After Macondo: Latin American Literature and the 1960s

Como irreversible proceso de ruptura, la revolución en América latina está en marcha.

Jaime Mejía Duque (1974)

It has been extensively noted that the Spanish American narrative Boom's decline forecasts those of nationalpopular centered, emancipatory sequences of the twentieth century. Whether gratuitous or deserved, the perceived relation of this decline to, variously, the overthrow of the Popular Unity government in Chile, the destruction of the Mexican student movement, the defeat of guerilla groups on a continental scale, as well as the discrediting of the Cuban Revolution is a forceful and compelling site of Latin Americanist reflection. Our discipline maintains as secret legacy a perceived connection between particular forms of literary culture and certain political desires, which enters a period of both intensity and disarticulation in the 1960s. Latin American literature both culminates and enters its definitive crisis with the Boom. In perhaps the most agreed upon version of this story, the Boom novels "consolidate" the state through a thematic-narrative moment, as well as through their role in constituting a reading public, and yet, the Boom also represents a point of entry to the transnational field, which implies a kind of telling of the Latin American secret to the even greater transnational reading public whose contribution to book sales is partly what defines the Boom as such. This entry constitutes its trans- or post-national moment, and is also emblematic of larger, epochal trends with respect to the social insertion of culture. Latin American literature's circulation far beyond Latin America forms both an entry of literature as well as Latin American difference—because the latter was both internationally constituted as well as locally sutured through literature—into the market. Along these lines we might understand the sense in which the Boom maintains two contradictory alliances: one to the national-popular/planning state, the other to a transnational literary market. Following this symptomatic appearance of the Boom, what remains for literature and literary theory is a reflection upon what the literary can still accomplish and under what terms might it secure the future of its own social being, if at all.

I take as a point of departure an essay written by Colombian critic Jaime Mejía Duque, "El 'Boom' de la narrativa latino-americana," published in 1974. From a perspective that Neil Larsen has described as "revolutionary-historicist" (69), Mejía Duque addresses what he refers to as its "constitutive ambiguity:"

También alienta ahí la razón profunda, la 'razón histórica,' de que para la conciencia general en América Latina tanto como en Europa y aun más allá, el 'boom'—fenómeno particularmente capitalista—apareciera funcionando en una articulación viva y agitacional con la revolución. Esto es lo que denominamos la ambigüedad constitutiva del 'boom.' Precisamente por ser eso—constitutiva—no era superable por el 'boom' mismo.

(133)

Mejía Duque provides the militant version of a reading of the Boom which has become more or less canonical.¹ As registered here, the constitutive nature of this tension—for Mejía Duque, an ideological and political ambiguity—entails that the Boom is not itself capable of "overcoming" this ambiguity, which constitutes a strangely "successful" exteriorization of the Cuban Revolution in spite of not only the waning of the Boom's commitment to that revolution, but also, more generally, its failure to secure its own stake in the Latin American social field, despite (as a result of) its own social force (that is, despite the fact that it appears in this revolutionary atmosphere). Yet, as I hope to show, we can still retrace a specific and resonant opening to the overcoming of this ambiguity in the rhetorical de-constitution of the Boom. As Brett Levinson writes, "Closure is the assignment of the literary" (4). Perhaps in this sense the Boom should be defined by its gesture of literary self-cancellation, which forms its retreat from the possibility of its social insertion, a retreat that simultaneously claims the only possible literary politics. To understand closure as the task of the literary is to posit the...