Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel

Preface and Acknowledgments

P R E FA C E A N D A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S In his celebrated essay “Our America” (1891), after analyzing the social and political conflicts that bedeviled the Spanish American nations after their independence, José Martí offered a hopeful vision of the continent’s situation: “They tried hatred, and every year the countries were worse off. Tired of the useless hatred of book against lance, of reason against the votive candle, of city against country, of the impossible hegemony of the divided urban castes against the tempestuous but inert natural nation, they are beginning to try—almost without knowing it—love” (Letras fieras 165). Here, as in other moments in his life and work, the Cuban patriot and modernista poet, who also called for a “war without hatred” against Spanish colonialism, tried to bring together two terms that many would regard as incompatible: politics and love. The twentieth century in Spanish America, which Martí did not live to see, postponed indefinitely that nascent project. In the midst of the many revolutions, coups d’état, uprisings, wars of liberation, and dirty wars suffered by the continent in the past century, both political rhetoric and literary expression were often dominated by the lexicon and the images of violence, death, and destruction. However, the last thirty years have seen the development of a new current of narrative fiction in Spanish America that opposes these tendencies and, without forsaking the traditional social concerns of Spanish American literature, seeks to reaffirm the value of individual subjectivity, of the affective life of individuals, and, more concretely, of love. With the end of the Cold War and the loss of interest v i i i Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel in the revolutionary option, a broad segment of today’s Spanish American narrative has begun to pay increased attention to topics such as romantic love and sentimentalism which, for reasons that will be examined in this book, had been subordinated or left aside in the Spanish American narrative of prior years. The roster of the main exponents of this new sentimental modality includes authors from more recent generations as well as the major figures of the Boom period: Isabel Allende, Miguel Barnet, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Laura Esquivel, Rosario Ferré, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Angeles Mastretta, Elena Poniatowska, Manuel Puig, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Marcela Serrano, Antonio Skármeta, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among many others. Thanks to this new sentimental novel, a new repertoire of characters and situations has entered the Spanish American literary memory: the erotico-political musings of Rachel, a Cuban vaudeville dancer and singer of the 1920s; the unanswered letters in which Quiela, a Russian painter, reproaches her ex-husband, Diego Rivera , for abandoning her; the misadventures of Marito, a young Peruvian writer in love with his aunt; the passionate wanderings of Martín Romaña in Paris during the student uprisings of May 1968; the drawn-out love of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza under the yellow flag of a cholera epidemic; the kitchen recipes that become love potions in the hands of the Mexican Tita de la Garza; the amatory legend forged by a Puerto Rican bolero singer, Daniel Santos, throughout the length and breadth of Spanish America . . . Undoubtedly, the best works of the new sentimental narrative are much more than frivolous attempts to commercially exploit a subject—love— that always “sells.” Despite their superficially apolitical appearance, these novels are a clear ethical response to the ideological dogma, the social conflicts, and the political violence that marred Spanish American culture though the decades of the 1960s to the 1980s. It is also important to view them as fictional experiments that explore, through the topic of love, the power of literature to fascinate readers and to create a sense of communion and community among writers, readers, and texts. Recalling the old dichotomy of passionate love versus the love of one’s fellows, it can be said that a great many of the new sentimental novels attempt to instill in their readers the latter kind of love, a neighborly love based on a respect for “the Other.” Once again in these fictions, as in Martí’s visionary words, the Spanish American writers, “tired of useless hatred, are beginning to try love.” Preface and Acknowledgments i x In the pages...