From Modernization to Resistance: Latin American Literature 1959-1976

Abstract

Now that the excitement that surrounded the boom of Latin American writing in the sixties has dissipated, it is clear that literature itself was in crisis and that certain canons and assumptions that had long given support to writers and critics had become questionable. The symptoms could be identified in certain novels which were unable to reconcile conflicting intentions (Cambio de piel [Change of Skin] ' by Carlos Fuentes, for instance) or were blocked by the impossibility of completion as was Jose Maria Arguedas's El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo; at other times, there were marked changes between an author's earlier and later works, as in the case of Cortazar and Vargas Llosa' or radical revisions were made of earlier theoretical positions like those made between the first and second editions of Octavio Paz's El arco y la lira (The Bow and the Lyre); or between the final version of Carlos Fuentes' La nueva novela hispanoamericana and the articles on which it was based. If this crisis was felt most acutely in the novel, it was because certain of its integral features its linearity, the mimetic (i.e., its claim to represent a moral or historical truth), the concept of character and even the tense in which it was written had come to seem problematic. These characteristic features were criticized as so many devices which naturalized the bourgeois order and thus reproduced its ideology (Barthes, 1967), while writing that activated the reader's perceptions was assumed to transgress bourgeois ideology. Terms like modernism (in the Anglo-American sense),' avant-garde or the more recent ecriture 4 are