The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

Nine: Rereading Novels of the Boom

Nine Rereading Novels of the Boom Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez have written a large corpus of outstanding fiction, and each has published more than one novel that has garnered broad critical acclaim and a large international readership . Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez have published several best-selling novels in the United States and Europe. Among the most recognized Spanish American works of fiction to appear during the s were Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (), Cortázar’s Rayuela (), Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde (), and García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (). These works have had considerable impact among readers and writers in Latin America. Indeed , many scholars and writers already consider them modern classics . In each of these novels, the author uses a variety of approaches to express his desire to be modern and to assume his modernity. These four novels and a few others were the initial cause for the discussions by Latin American writers and critics in the s and s of the ‘‘total novel.’’ The total novel aspires to represent an inexhaustible reality; it is conceived as a microcosm of signification; it is characterized by a fusion of mythical and historical perspectives.1 Indeed, these four novels were ambitious modernist works that contained many of the elements associated with the total novel. For example, all four cultivate an encyclopedic range of reference as a means toward representing an inexhaustible reality; at the same time, all four were conceived as self-contained systems or microcosms of signification. Fuentes had been writing short fiction since the early s, and La Tseng 2003.2.4 07:37 6754 Williams / THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL / sheet 151 of 280 138 Modern and Cosmopolitan Works, 1962–1967 muerte de Artemio Cruz appeared after La región más transparente and Las buenas conciencias. With the publication of these novels, Fuentes confirmed what he and many of his young contemporaries were stating in their cultural magazine Revista Mexicana de Literatura : Mexican literature needed to be more modern and universal. For Fuentes, being modern meant joining in the international modernist movement in fiction. La región had considerable impact in Mexico, where it created quite a stir, but it was not until La muerte de Artemio Cruz that Fuentes became well known beyond the borders of Mexico. With this novel, Fuentes assumes not only his modernity, but also his own national history. Fuentes himself considers all his fiction one work, a lifetime writing project he has organized around fourteen cycles that he has entitled ‘‘La edad del tiempo’’—a lengthy reflection on time. The four works that Fuentes calls ‘‘El mal del tiempo’’ comprise the first of these fourteen cycles, and they deal with the problem of time itself. In them, any sense of Western linear time is blurred; in different ways, they undermine and destroy time.2 Narrated in alternating segments of first, second, and third person , La muerte de Artemio Cruz is the story of one man as well as of twentieth-century Mexican history. As a prototype modernist fiction, it consists of a series of fragments that the reader places together in the process of reading in order to find an implicit unity of the novel. Paradoxically, as the reader finds progressively more order, the protagonist and the nation suffer greater fragmentation. Cruz’s story is a reconstruction of his life that parallels the rise of the new order that took power in Mexico during and after the Mexican Revolution. As Faris has observed, four specific failings of postrevolutionary Mexican society recur throughout La muerte de Artemio Cruz: class domination, Americanization, financial corruption, and the failure of land reform.3 In the early scenes of the novel, Fuentes takes the reader through a series of brief portrayals of Cruz as an individual devoid of feelings for his wife and family and of the entire family’s hierarchy of dominance. For Cruz and his family, there is always something more important—a business deal or a shopping trip—than the masses of people suffering from the domination of the upper class to which Cruz belongs.Clearly, Cruz and his class represent a betrayal of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution and the  Constitution that was to bring it to institutional fruition. In the end, the implied author of La muerte de Artemio Cruz shares...