Rationalism Called into Question in the Latin American Narrative: From Jorge Luis Borges to Jorge Amado

Abstract

Among the many elements markedly present within Latin American twentieth-century literature, one that stands out as a characteristic feature is the criticism of a rationalist logic. This criticism is expressed in distinct ways, extending from simple critique to the employment of the mimetic realism that dominates this type of cultural production to the exploration of two categories of the real. In itself, the introduction of these categories of real within a narrative threatens any attempt at representation based exclusively on the reproduction of an empirically provable reality. These categories, which have been designated the “strange,” the “uncommon,” the “fantastic,” or the “marvelous,” or even the “strangely fantastic” the “purely marvelous,” or “marvelous realism,” have been the object of study of a number of literary critics and theorists. The intention here, however, is neither to direct the reader’s attention to these concepts nor to attempt to classify literary works based on them. Instead, it is simply to examine how works such as those by Jorge Luis Borges and Jorge Amado have many elements in common even though there are remarkable differences between them, elements that derive from the use of the fantastic as a form of protest against rationalist logic and as the only way to understand the real in literature. In an already classic book on the subject, Introduction a la litterature fantastique (1970), translated by Richard Howard as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973), Tzvetan Todorov affirms that the fantastic