The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

Four: Rereading Spanish American Criollista Classics

Four Rereading Spanish American Criollista Classics The traditionalist writers pursued their search for the modern in the form of criollista novels. Canonical works written in the traditional (realist-naturalist) mode in Spanish America were La vorágine () by José Eustasio Rivera, Don Segundo Sombra () by Ricardo Guiraldes, Las memorias de Mamá Blanca () by Teresa de la Parra, and Doña Bárbara () by Rómulo Gallegos. These writers were seen as Latin American masters of the traditional craft of fiction, although their works were affected by the vanguardia, too.1 Their desire to be modern varied; in all cases they held ambiguous and contradictory attitudes about what they understood as modern.These four novels were, nevertheless, important texts for nation building and the search for cultural autonomy, even though they and others like them were often closely associated with the old aristocracy and its patriarchal order.2 The critical bibliography of these novels is substantive, consisting of a lengthy list of studies published since the s but primarily from the s to the s, when the criollista novel was still in vogue. Carlos Alonso has analyzed the discourse of cultural autochthony that has become virtually synonymous with the novelistic production of Rivera, Guiraldes, Gallegos, and many other Latin American writers of the s and s.3 Alonso argues that the search for an indigenous cultural identity should be understood as an attempt to empower the Latin American writer in the face of modernity’s threat to undermine the authority of his discourse. The writers of the s Boom were modernity’s latest and most Tseng 2003.2.4 07:37 6754 Williams / THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL / sheet 67 of 280 54 Traditional and Modernist Aesthetics, 1922–1940 devastating threat to the authority of the regionalist discourse, which prevailed well into the s. In both their fiction and their critical essays, the writers of the Boom published essays that were devastating for the criollista masters. In his widely read Nueva novela hispanoamericana (), Carlos Fuentes claimed that these classic texts led to essentially the same outcome: the protagonists were devoured by nature (the jungle, the llano, and so forth). Vargas Llosa, morever, made numerous references to these novels as ‘‘primitive.’’ For Doris Sommer, on the other hand, these criollista novels were an entire canon of ‘‘great novels’’ that the writers of the Boom dismissed all too easily.4 More importantly for Sommer, they were key texts in the history of nation building. Following the example of Benedict Anderson, Sommer stresses the continuities between this nation building and print communities formed around newspapers and novels. Sommer shows how national ideals are grounded in heterosexual relationships that provided a figure for national consolidation. She reminds readers that before the Boom, Latin American literature had the capacity to intervene in history, to help construct it.5 As realist-naturalist writers, as well as for their search for an indigenous identity, Guiraldes, Gallegos, and Rivera were the most recognized novelists of the period. Don Segundo Sombra chronicles a young boy’s rite de passage in the process of becoming a gaucho and an adult. Doña Bárbara is the tale of a conflict between civilization and barbarism. La vorágine is ostensibly the story of the protagonist’s adventure into the Colombian jungle. All three are novels of adventures —the protagonists travel from the city to a rural area. In Las memorias de Mamá Blanca, the protagonist eventually travels from her idyllic hacienda to the city, although the novel deals primarily with her experience as a child on the hacienda. Don Segundo Sombra consists of twenty-seven chapters narrated by the protagonist, Fabio. The general setting is the pampa of Argentina . In the first part, which consists of nine chapters, the orphaned Fabio is fourteen years old and departs with the gaucho Don Segundo Sombra. During these apprenticeship years, Fabio learns the ways of the gaucho from Don Segundo. In the second part of nine chapters, five years have passed and the young boy has become an adult and a gaucho. In the third part, Fabio and Don Segundo are occasionally together, but this part also tells of Fabio inheriting land and learning how to read and write literature.Throughout the novel, Guiraldes describes the autochthonous elements of life on the pampa. Tseng 2003.2.4 07:37 6754 Williams / THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL / sheet 68 of 280 [18.118.184.237] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 14:41...