Francisco Ayala's New World Creations in Their Generic Context

Abstract

Francisco Ayala's New World writings are characterized by deep meditation on factors underlying the misuse of power and violent divisions among people. This becomes evident when his exceptional treatment of such topics as dictatorship and the Spanish Civil War are examined in the context of their generic representa tion. His subtle artistic procedures place both interpretive and moral onus on the reader. unreliable narrator The tendency to partisanship continued with the first of the novels of this subgenre, Jos? M?rmol's Amalia (1851). The author and the point of view in the novel overtly identify them selves with the Unitarians in the quest for political power in Argentina against the incumbent Federalists headed by Juan Manuel de Rosas. The early prestige that was accorded to this novel, which demonstrated the hallmarks of romanticism, came from the coincidence of literary fashion and the political interests of the newspaper-owning class which serialized it for the newspaper reading class. In time, readers of the academic class who were sympathetic to the interests of the rural and minority people would take issue with the political slant and the image of the dictator. In approaching his writings on the theme of dictatorship, Ayala seems to have considered such interpretive changeableness to be a hazard and to strive for works of constructive stability in this as in other narrative subgenres. In 1968 Mario Vargas Llosa wrote to several leading Latin American novelists soliciting their collaboration in a project concerning dictators. We learn from one of these writers, the