Narrative, Criticism, and Politics: Negotiating Latin American Transition

Abstract

Letters To A Young Novelist. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Pp. 136. $17.00 cloth.) A Story Teller: Mario Vargas Llosa Between Civilization and Barbarism. By Braulio Muñoz. (Oxford and Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000. Pp. xi+135. $56.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.) Latin American Novels of tThe Conquest: Reinventing the New World. By Kimberle S. López. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Pp. x+260. $37.50 cloth.) No Apocalypse, No Integration: Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America. By Martín Hopenhayn. Translated by Cynthia Margarita Tompkins and Elizabeth Rosa Horan. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. xix+160. $64.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.) The Ends Of Literature: The Latin American "Boom" in the Neoliberal Marketplace. By Brett Levinson. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+208. $49.50 cloth, $21.95 paper.) Much has been said lately about the cultural aspects of Latin America's recent political and economic transitions. The exhaustion of the developmentalist state model, postdictatorship, globalization, neoliberalism; such phenomena have manifested themselves prominently within the field of cultural production, which in turn has shaped the comprehension of transition. Though some may suggest otherwise, literature, an often-privileged form of cultural production, is not isolated from its contemporary context. This fact is perhaps most evident in recent critical discourse, which has been insistently questioning and rethinking literature's relevance and representative legitimacy.1 The [End Page 268] literary "Boom" of the 1960s persists as a central reference point for critical reflection, probably because the Boom represented, or appeared to represent, the clearest, most resounding, and regionally uniform response to the question of literature's pertinence for comprehending Latin America. Understood as the novelistic manifestation of a way to reconcile the contradiction of combining ontology and history, the Boom incorporated much more than the most prominent works of a handful of writers. Its celebrators defined it as the pinnacle of mid-twentieth-century literary production and thought, a phenomenon that explained no less than who Latin Americans were by demonstrating the historical reasons for their identity.2 It became a grand narrative of its own importance, a narrative not unlike other pretransition stories, such as the developmentalist state and the teleology of national liberation.3 Like other such narratives, the Boom's current remnants exist as a fragmentary cluster of unanswered questions, a discursive field that has, paradoxically, shaped the same critical discourse that highlights its tenuous validity. Thus recent scholarship on Latin American narrative, fictional and otherwise, finds itself in the precarious position of reflecting upon the present while recognizing and at times emphasizing the difficulty, or impossibility, of sustaining the paradigms it has inherited. [End Page 269] The five texts I review in this essay formulate answers to a number of questions passed down from the Boom and its discursive context. What is literature? What makes a good novel? How are fiction, politics, and national identity interrelated? How does Latin America's colonial past continue to inform contemporary efforts to construct regional identity? To what extent is it possible to define collective, socially equitable political narratives in contemporary Latin America? How do literature and literary analysis help develop a rigorous critical position that is capable of challenging neoliberal hegemony? While only two of these texts, Hopenhayn's and Levinson's, explicitly address Latin American transition, all of them respond, in one way or another, to its effects. Returning to his earlier critical efforts, most notably Historia de un deicidio,4 Vargas Llosa continues to insist upon the autonomy of the literary work and, by extension, criticism. His efforts to establish universal criteria for literary quality speak to his reluctance to engage with contemporary critical debates. Muñoz's portrait of Vargas Llosa favorably contrasts modernist ideals, particularly regarding ethics and sociology, to postmodernism and the contemporary consequences of the market's...