Timothy R. Robbins, José Eduardo González (Eds.) - New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative - Post-National Literatures and The Canon - (2014)

New Trends in Contemporary
Latin American Narrative

Literatures of the A mericas
About the Series

This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within
a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin
America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in litera-
ture in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical bound-
aries and also include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the United
States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contemporary issues
of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is rooted in tra-
ditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include cutting-edge
scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical race, and ecofeminist
approaches.
Series Editor
Norma E. Cantú is Professor of English and US Latino Studies at the
University of Missouri, Kansas City and Professor Emerita from the University
of Texas at San Antonio. Her edited and coedited works include Inside the
Latin@ Experience (2010), Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios
(2001), Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change (2000), and Dancing
Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos (2003).
Books in the Series:

Radical Chicana Poetics
Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez
Rethinking Chicano/a Literature through Food: Postnational Appetites
Edited by Nieves Pascual Soler and Meredith E. Abarca
Literary and Cultural Relations between Brazil and Mexico: Deep Undercurrents
Paulo Moreira
Mexican Public Intellectuals
Edited by Debra A. Castillo and Stuart A. Day
TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature
Edited by Brian L. Price, César A. Salgado, and John Pedro Schwartz
The UnMaking of Latina/o Citizenship: Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics
Edited by Ellie D. Hernández and Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson
New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National
Literatures and the Canon
Edited by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González
New Trends in Contemporary
Latin American Narrative
Post-National Literatures and
the Canon
Edited by
Timothy R. Robbins and
José Eduardo González
new trends in contemporary latin american narrative
Copyright © Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-44470-7
All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-49574-0 ISBN 978-1-137-44471-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137444714
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative : Post-National
Literatures and the Canon / edited by Timothy R. Robbins and
José Eduardo González.
pages cm.—(Literatures of the Americas)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-49574-0
1. Latin American fiction—21st century—History and criticism.
2. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Robbins, Timothy R., 1980– editor of
compilation. II. González, José Eduardo, editor of compilation.
PQ7082.N7P67 2014
863—dc23 2014005815
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Contributors vii
Introduction
Posnacionalistas: Tradition and New Writing in Latin America 1
Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González
Chapter 1
From the Mexican Onda to McOndo: The Shifting
Ideology of Mass Culture 15
Timothy R. Robbins
Chapter 2
Bolaño and the Canon 39
Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat
Chapter 3
The Crack and Contemporary Latin American Narrative:
An Introductory Study 55
Tomás Regalado López
Chapter 4
Deep Literature and Dirty Realism: Rupture and
Continuity in the Canon 85
Gerardo Cruz-Grunerth
Chapter 5
The Historical and Geographical Imagination in Recent
Argentine Fiction: Rodrigo Fresán and the DNA of
a Globalized Writer 105
Emilse B. Hidalgo
Chapter 6
An Impossible Witness of The Armies 133
Lotte Buiting
vi C o n te n t s
Chapter 7
The Narco-Letrado: Intellectuals and Drug Trafficking in
Darío Jaramillo Agudelo’s Cartas cruzadas 153
Alberto Fonseca
Chapter 8
The Reader as Translator: Rewriting the Past in
Contemporary Latin American Fiction 169
Janet Hendrickson
Chapter 9
Multiple Names and Time Superposition: No Anxiety in
the Electronic Poetics of Yolanda Arroyo and Diego Trelles 191
Eduard Arriaga-Arango
Chapter 10
Of Hurricanes and Tempests: Ena Lucía Portela’s Text as a
Nontourist Destination 217
Index 239
Contributors
Eduard Arriaga-Arango is professor of Hispanic Studies at the

Western University (Ontario). He is the author of Las redes del gusto:
exclusiones, inclusiones y desplazamientos en el campo de la novela en
Colombia: 1990–2005 (A Web of Tastes: Exclusions, Inclusions, and
Displacements in the Colombian novel: 1990–2005) and has also
published an introduction to literary theory in Spanish. His articles
have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Casa de las Américas,
and Revista Cuadernos de Literatura del Caribe e Hispanoamérica.
Lotte Buiting is a PhD candidate at the Harvard University in the
Department of Romance Languages. Her dissertation is entitled
“Echoes of the Child in Latin American Literature and Film.” Her
research employs methodologies and research carried out in child-
hood, gender and performance studies, and it draws from various
theoretical perspectives to elucidate different ways in which the fig-
ure of the child is construed. She has recently presented papers at
the Latin American Studies Association Congress and the American
Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting.
Gerardo Cruz-Grunerth is a Mexican fiction writer whose recent
novels include Últimas horas (The Last Hours, 2009) and Tela de
araña (Spiderweb, 2011). He studied literary theory and Hispanic
American literature at the University of Guadalajara where he wrote
his thesis Mundos (casi) imposibles. La metalepsis en los mundos posibles
de la narrativa mexicana postmoderna (Almost Impossible Worlds.
Metalepsis in Mexican Postmodern Literature). He is currently the
recipient of an Erasmus Mundus fellowship to pursue further gradu-
ate studies in Europe.
Alberto Fonseca is assistant professor of Spanish at the North
Central College. He currently studies the relationship between ille-
gal drug trafficking and intellectuals, the “commercialization” of
viii C o n tr i b u t o r s
violence, and the general links between illegal activities and culture
in Colombia and Mexico.
José Eduardo González is associate professor of Spanish and Ethnic
Studies at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of Borges
and the Politics of Form (Garland/Routledge, 1998) and coeditor of
Primitivism and Identity in Latin America (Arizona University Press,
2000). His articles on the contemporary Latin American narrative
have appeared in Modern Language Notes, Revista Iberoamericana,
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (St. Louis), Latin American Literary
Review, Style, Revista de crítica literaria hispanoamericana, Nuevo
Texto Crítico, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and other scholarly
journals.
Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat is professor of Spanish and is the former
director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at
the Emory University. An established authority in Latin American
literary studies, he is the author of two important books on Chilean
literature, José Donoso: impostura e impostación (Jose Donoso: The
Discourse of Impersonation, Maryland: Hispamérica, 1983) and
El espacio de la crítica: estudios de literatura chilena moderna (Critical
Frames: Approaches to Modern Chilean Literature, Madrid: Orígenes,
1989), and he is currently working on a book about Roberto Bolaño.
Professor Gutiérrez-Mouat has edited the scholarly edition of José
Donoso’s Mascarada: Tres novelas cosmopolitas (México: FCE,
2006) as well as special issues of literary journals. He is also associate
editor and coauthor of the Dictionary of Twentieth Century Culture:
Hispanic Culture of South America (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995).
He has written over fifteen chapters for collective volumes on a wide
variety of topics related to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin
American literature and culture. Professor Gutiérrez-Mouat has
published over forty academic articles in scholarly journals such as:
Romance Notes, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Sin Nombre, Dispositio,
Revista Iberoamericana, Modern Language Studies, Nuevo Texto
Crítico, Hopscotch: A Cultural Review, Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies, Publications of the Modern Language Association,
and Modern Language Notes.
Janet Hendrickson is rapidly becoming a well-known translator
of new and recent Latin American literature. She recently trans-
lated Diego Paz’s groundbreaking anthology of new writing in
Latin America, The Future Is Not Ours (Rochester, New York: Open
Letter Books, 2012). Her translations have appeared in Granta,
C o n tr i b u t o r s ix
Zoetrope: All Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, The White Review,

and elsewhere. Hendrickson has an MFA Nonfiction Writing from
the University of Iowa and is a PhD student in Romance Studies at
Cornell University.
Emilse B. Hidalgo is a postdoctoral fellow at IRICE-CONICET in
Rosario, Argentina. Her articles on Argentine culture and literature
have appeared in the Journal of Material Culture, Bulletin of Latin
American Research, The International Journal of the Arts and Society,
Journal of Intercultural Studies, and other scholarly journals.
Tomás Regalado López is associate professor of Latin American
Literature at the James Madison University. He is the author of
La novedad de lo antiguo: la novela de Jorge Volpi (1992–1999) y la
tradición de la ruptura (Universidad de Salamanca, 2009) (Newness
of the Old: Joge Volpi’s Novels and the Tradition of Rupture). He
collaborated with the seven members of the Crack group to coauthor
the volume, Crack: instrucciones de uso (The Crack: User’s Manual,
Mondadori, 2004), and has published articles on Mexican litera-
ture in books and literary journals in Spain, France, Germany, Latin
America, and the United States.
Timothy R. Robbins is assistant professor of Spanish at Drury
University. His recent research focuses on late twentieth- and twenty-
first-century narratives with special attention to popular culture and
cultural interaction. He is currently coauthoring a reference text on
Latin American popular culture.
Introduction
Posnacionalistas: Tradition and

New Writing in Latin America
Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González
I n the 1977 preface to the Ayacucho Collection’s edition of Rubén

Darío’s poetry, Angel Rama opens with the question “Why is he still
‘alive’? Why, after new writers have eliminated his aesthetics, aban-
doned his precious vocabulary, surpassed his themes, and even repu-
diated his poetics, he stubbornly continues to sing with his powerful
voice?” (“Prólogo” 9). What fascinated Rama about modernismo—
and made him return to the topic time and again—was the move-
ment’s position within Latin American literary history as founders of
a tradition. Modernistas were the creators of a literary system that,
among other things, took into account the relationship between
authors and their main literary market, the Latin American readers.
For Rama, modernismo’s foundational gesture had two important
consequences: one, the search for a mode of expression uniquely
Latin American, an idea originally started in the early nineteenth
century, and, two, the unprecedented influence of the movement on
the region’s literary history. Modernismo became an obligatory point
of reference for future authors and movements. According to Rama,
with modernismo, for the first time, Latin American countries began
to read and publish literary works from other areas of the region:
“[The late nineteenth century modernization period] achieved some-
thing never witnessed in the continent, neither before nor after
Columbus: the interior inter-communication of the literary produc-
tion of the diverse Spanish speaking areas . . . The modern means of
communication—newspapers, news agencies, submarine communi-
cation cables, telegraphs—fostered the mutual desire to know about
each other” (“Modernización” 8). For example, José Enrique Rodó’s
1900 essay, Ariel, as Rama explains, was first published in Uruguay,
2 T i m o t h y R . R o b b i n s a n d J o s é E d ua r d o G o n z á l e z
and was almost immediately republished in Mexico, an unprecedented

action at the time. Rama’s question (“Why is he still ‘alive’?”) is par-
tially answered when one observes that Darío has been canonized by
the same literary system modernismo founded.
Rama thought he saw in the Boom a repeat of the modernismo
phenomenon, reading the works produced during the Boom period as
a continuation of the search for a style that expressed Latin America’s
culture, but also as another step in the creation of a literary system.
When one reads Rama’s 1980 assessment of emerging Latin American
writers, it is clear that in his view the Boom writers were strengthen-
ing the Latin American literary system in the same way modernis-
tas did, by providing new writers with a literary background beyond
national literary histories, a point of reference they all had in com-
mon (“Contestatarios” 460). It is doubtful anyone can still continue
taking the “search for literary autonomy” as a basic characteristic of
Latin American literature, but few would doubt the force that the
success of the Boom writers, like the modernistas more than a cen-
tury ago, has brought to the region’s literary system. In his preface to
El insomnio de Bolívar (Bolivar’s Insomnia, 2009), Jorge Volpi briefly
recounts his time spent as a graduate student in Salamanca. He con-
fesses that all the Latin American students in his group had very little
in common with each other and knew almost nothing about other
countries in the region than their own. Volpi comments that the only
thing they seemed to have in common, as students of literature, was
that they all could “quote Mariátegui, Rodó, Gallegos, Vasconcelos,
Mistral, Borges, Paz and the Boom” (23). In contrast, they could
only mention as few as four or five contemporary Latin American
writers. In other words, even if the cultural unity of the region does
not really exist, the Latin American literary system remains a com-
mon background that all writers share. One could, of course, argue
that our more advanced technologies of communications might end
up destroying the same system the old technologies created. Whether
that happens or not, Boom writers have become giant canonical
figures from whose shadow new writers are fighting to emerge.
The Boom writers’ aesthetics have congealed into a series of charac-
teristics that new writers are seeking to avoid: magical realism, alle-
gories of national or Latin American history, anti-imperialism, the
“total novel,” the defense of local or popular cultures, the emphasis
on language and technical experimentation, and, last but not least, an
unprecedented commercial success in the history of Latin American
letters. How and why the Boom was reduced to this reading is beyond
the scope of this introduction. Our modest purpose is to briefly
T r a d i t i o n a n d Ne w Wr i t i n g i n L at i n A m er i c a 3
describe the literature that has taken that partial reading of the Boom
as a point of departure. The Boom literature era was marked by the
Cuban Revolution and the guerrilla movements that sprang through-
out Latin America, a new stage of modernization and underdevel-
opment, the growing influence of North American mass culture,
especially cinema, the hopes and failures of the import substitution
industrialization model, and the emergence of violent authoritarian
regimes, among other events. In turn, since the last couple of decades
of the twentieth century Latin America has been transformed by a
series of social and economic changes that many have acknowledged
as determining the direction of contemporary fiction writing: the
neoliberal reorganization of the economy, cultural globalization,
astounding advances in technological communication such as the
emergence of cyberspace, to mention a few. Without a doubt, the
most visible literary signal that a radical mindset change had taken
place was the publication of the short story anthology McOndo in
1996. It has been seventeen years since the book appeared. Obviously,
it is impossible to tell whether any of the authors included in the
collection will ever reach the influence and stature of the Boom writ-
ers, but only a few would contest that the introduction to the book,
written by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, has already secured a
significant place in the history of Latin American literature.
The McOndo aesthetic, expressed in the anthology’s introduc-
tion, emphasized the weight of the literary canon, especially as it
relates to the international publishing industry. Evidence of this is
ample, from Alberto Fuguet’s now well-known anecdote of not being
able to publish one of his texts in an American short story collection
because it was not “Latin American” enough (Fuguet and Gómez
10), to Rodrigo Fresán’s comments in Palabra de América (Word
from America, 2004) that “the persistent shadow of the Boom is what
covers and asphyxiates like a blanket in summer all the young and
almost ex-young Latin American writers” (55). It is inevitable that
critics will focus on the nature of literature and literary innovation
through the prism of what McOndo signified—a globalization that
emphasizes technological advances, a deterritorialized sense of iden-
tity that has more to do with the personal and the global than the
national. In his chapter, Eduard Arraiga comments on the construc-
tion of the identity of Latin American narrative as a magical realist,
but also notes the importance of technology—or lack thereof—in
this identity. He maintains that the McOndo introduction combats
this image of Latin America precisely through the use and inclu-
sion of technological advances. The attempt to portray the Latin
American experience as a deterritorialized and global space has at

the same time fueled criticisms of the McOndo aesthetic falling into
the same trap that it attempts to remedy. While McOndo tried to
combat the uniform vision of the Latin American narrative, it cre-
ates another monolithic dichotomy of Latin American experience.
As Diego Trelles Paz argues in the introduction to The Future Is Not
Ours (2012), “If the worst Latin American magical realism ends up
reduced to exotic-on-demand for foreign consumers and American
and European Spanish departments, ‘McOndo’ replaces this figure,
deformed by a magic wand, with an excluding Latin American real-
ity consisting of the lounge and the mall” (xvi). Diana Palaversich
for her part argues that Fuguet and Gómez are merely devaluing
an “underdeveloped, poor, indigenous, or marginalized” part of the
Latin American reality in which they are not interested (36).
McOndo also signifies a strong recognition of market forces
with its desire for a clean break with what the international market
demanded of Latin American literature. Just as the Boom was initially
a publishing phenomenon, the term McOndo also became a market-
ing strategy for academic and literary publications. This is a situation
that Fuguet later criticizes himself, stating in his blog:
More than 11 years have passed since the damned appearance of
McOndo and I continue to have doubts about it: not about the idea,
or the awareness, because I believe in it and believe that I write and
film in it (in the republic or country McOndo) but I continue to doubt
labeling this zeitgeist (can something that lasts so long be a sign of
the times?) or this way of looking from “this side of the path” with a
name so sonorous/nice/cute/sellable/marketable . . . furthermore, the
anthology will not be published again (no, NEVER), McOndo seems
like it will remain, among other things because it does not depend on
me at all. (“¿Novelas McOndo?”)
In the present collection, Janet Hendrickson, Emilse Hidalgo, and

Arraiga all note the importance of market forces on the McOndo
phenomenon and how the authors themselves tailor their self-image
to both distance themselves from and to fit within the international
literary market. Hidalgo, in particular, points out Rodrigo Fresán’s
need to distance himself from the Latin American magical realist tra-
dition even though it is not one that was particularly strong in his
native Argentina. Hendrickson takes a different approach, explaining
the importance of translation and interpretation for international suc-
cess. According to Hendrickson, whose chapter ponders the question
of how Latin American authors deal with the international perception
of the Boom, translation and conformity to the stereotyped percep-

tion of regional or national literature are integral parts of international
success. These are also the elements that writers—and Hendrickson
would argue, especially anthologists—must address in order to have
commercial success.
In compiling a collection of essays focusing on contemporary
Latin American narrative, we were faced with the decision of whether
to exclude the McOndo and Crack groups that appeared in the 1990s
and focus on the “newest” and most recent authors. Some, like Diego
Trelles Paz, have suggested that one needs to separate the period of
the 1990s from the most recent writers gaining recognition in the last
decade. However, it became clear to us that in spite of all the criticism
leveled at the McOndo and Crack movements—well documented
here—young writers in 2014 are still preoccupied with the same
social, political, and aesthetic issues that influenced Fresán and Volpi
in the late 1990s. If anything, those epochal changes have become
intensified. In this collection, we study writers who have emerged
since the end of the twentieth century as members of a generation,
and we are interested in their individual aesthetic responses to a spe-
cific historical period. We have therefore devoted chapters to both the
literature from the end of the twentieth century and the twenty-first
century. Moreover, even though the relationship of contemporary lit-
erature with the Boom is the most evident sign of the emergence of
a new generation, some of the chapters in our volume also focus on
contemporary authors’ take on other Latin American literary tradi-
tions. Alberto Fonseca contrasts Darío Jaramillo Agudelo’s portrayal
of intellectuals inhabiting a society transformed by the illegal drug
trade with the tradition of the Latin American letrado; José Eduardo
González studies Portela’s innovative use of a classic Cuban literary
symbol, the hurricane; one of Lotte Buiting’s objectives is to place a
text by Evelio Rosero as an example of the last cycle of La Violencia
novels in Colombia; Timothy Robbins studies how the presence of
popular culture in McOndo group’s texts differentiates from the
Mexican Onda’s or Manuel Puig’s use of the same resource.
Having decided to bring together both the end of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty-first into one literary period
forces us to consider a few problems. The first one is determining the
beginning of the period, which is, of course, a difficult task. Both
the Crack manifesto and the McOndo preface appeared in 1996, tak-
ing apparently opposite attitudes toward the Boom canon but they
were neither the first nor the last to propose new directions for Latin
American narrative. Cruz-Grunerth’s chapter focuses on the “dirty
realism” aesthetics that preceded the Crack, which might have more
in common with Crack aesthetics than the members of either group
would like to admit. Ricardo Mouat, for his part, studies Roberto
Bolaño—and his complex relationship with the Boom aesthetics—
the figure generally accepted to be the inspiration for many of con-
temporary literary projects. The second problem would be about the
name to use when referring to this moment in the Latin American
narrative. Although some of the contributors to this volume have
applied the term Post-Boom to all the literary work that chrono-
logically have appeared after the end of the Boom period (mid- to
late 1970s), most seem to reserve the label Post-Boom to a group
of writers who began to write immediately after the success of the
Boom. In the eyes of these critics, when McOndo and Crack mem-
bers criticize the commercialization of Latin American literature they
are rebelling against, the fabrication of “magical realist” and other
essentialist fiction for the consumption of the Anglo-European pub-
lic, those authors were thinking of Post-Boom literature. Periodizing
contemporary literature as a sequence consisting of the Boom and
the Post-Boom groups preceding the new generation is too simple to
account for the “postmodern” fiction of Piglia, Boullosa, or Eltit, for
example.1 However, recognizing its simplicity does not eliminate the
possibility that new writers have simplified the Boom and Post-Boom
periods to erect their own aesthetic positions. What name can we give
this group of turn-of-the-century intellectuals? Provisionally, we will
name them posnacionalistas, or the post-national generation, because,
as will become evident below, the most important social changes that
define their lives are in one way or another linked to the erosion of
the nation-state and a fragile production of locality.
A third problem is the description of the literary period. Instead of
writing the typical list of textual characteristics and/or epochal phe-
nomena, we would like to focus on four aspects of contemporary life
in Latin America that we think are strongly shaping the way cultural
producers relate to their social formations and their national spaces.
The first common experience is the emergence of a global popular
culture as a formative component of the Latin American subject.
Many would rightly argue that the economic effects of globalization
have a more significant and lasting impact on Latin American societies
than global cultural products. However, perhaps because of global
popular culture’s visibility, its daily presence, and unprecedented
accessibility, fiction writers and cultural critics alike have focused on
its impact on Latin Americans’ self-perception. The idea was already
present in Fuguet and Gómez’s much discussed text. Their assertion
that Latin American culture is not only limited to folkloric music but
that one must also include within it modern Latin American mass
culture—generally modeled after American pop culture—was already
pointing in this direction. The Boom, and to a certain extent the
Post-Boom, literature is thus associated with a view of popular culture
as the seat of the true Latin American culture as opposed to an elit-
ist, “foreign” oriented high culture. The stronger emphasis on mass/
pop culture present in contemporary writers would indicate that they
possess a new notion of “Latin American” identity that is no longer
tied to a place, tradition, or national heritage. Thus, it is no longer
a conflict between a national (elite) high culture and a (low class)
popular culture, but a case of a global popular culture that shapes
the Latin American subject versus the Latin American state’s archaic
view of a “national” culture. Néstor García Canclini’s Consumers and
Citizens (1995) remains one of the best examples of the view that
Latin Americans spend more time exposed to mass culture than to
any other aspect of their societies. For García Canclini, the culture
industry shapes the identities of the region’s inhabitants:
It is difficult for the state to make strategic interventions if the major-

ity of cultural ministries and councils persist in believing that culture
and identity are shaped predominantly by fine arts, with a pinch of
indigenous and peasant cultures, traditional crafts and music. If it is
true that part of our identities is still rooted in those traditional sym-
bolic formations, it should also not be forgotten that 70 percent of the
population are city dwellers and that an increasing number of these live
in an almost exclusive connection with the culture industries. (101)
García Canclini associates the Boom, and Post-Boom, literary

products with the Latin American states’ outmoded view of culture
(79–80), which would seem to suggest that contemporary literary
texts respond to the deterritorialized popular culture now emerging.
This new perception of popular culture, of course, means that the old
idea of a state protecting its citizens from exposure to “cultural impe-
rialism” has ceased to be relevant. However, García Canclini himself,
as many have noted, is one of those worried about the increasing
Americanization of global popular culture and—without using the
word “imperialism”—still argues for the need of the state to inter-
vene in controlling how culture is consumed. But if Latin Americans
are exposed more than ever to mass culture, is the use of popular
culture products in contemporary authors different from what was
already present in Puig or even in the Mexican Onda texts? Is there
anything new in Fuguet’s use of video clubs in Por favor, Rebobinar
(Please Rewind, 1998), Fresán’s use of Mexican comics, lucha libre,

and rock and pop music in Mantra (2001). Robbins’s chapter on mass
media from the Onda to Fuguet tries to answer those questions as he
illustrates the surprising differences in the way in which the authors
from different contexts and time periods utilize mass culture in their
arguments about identity and culture.
A second epochal phenomenon that has affected literature in dif-
ferent forms is the rise of the Internet. The influence of the Internet
or cyberspace is usually lumped together with mass media as exam-
ples of the “new technologies” that are shaping the new narrative.
About six years ago, in “A Cyberliterary Afterword: Of Blogs and
Other Matters,” Paz Soldán asserted that in “Latin American litera-
ture there has always existed a tradition of strong relationships with
new technologies and mass media. Considering only the twentieth
century, we can find in many novels, chronicles, essays, and poems an
attempt to establish a dialogue . . . between literature and new tech-
nologies” (258). A statement that is followed by a list of the usual
names: Borges as a “precursor” of hypertext, Puig’s use of cinema,
in combination with a list of young new writers. Paz Soldán acknow
ledges that cyberspace has had little effect on the structure of literary
texts in Latin America aside from a few texts that have focused on the
use of new technologies in daily life. For the same reason, the article
focuses on the use of cyberspace for the distribution of traditional
literary texts and, especially, on the blog format, which Paz Soldán
says, “is currently threatening to supplant the novel as the great genre
in which everything can find its place. Thanks to the appearance of a
new technological format we are witnessing, in ‘real time,’ the birth
of a new literary genre” (260). He then goes on to compare the emer-
gence of blogs with the creation of the nineteenth-century modernista
chronicle. Six years later, not only has the blog failed to become a new
genre, it is slowly diminishing in importance in the face of new for-
mats like Twitter, as Arriaga has noticed in his chapter on “electronic
poetics.” Perhaps one should not be surprised by this development
and instead begin to acknowledge the rapid obsolesce of the so-called
new technologies—Fuguet’s rewinding of VHS cassettes, Fresán’s
hidden CD tracks—as a one of the reasons for contemporary litera-
ture not focusing so much on them. Arriaga’s essay navigates between
his analysis of Fuguet’s disappointment with and abandonment of
the blog format and Diego Trelles’s and Yolanda Arroyo’s use of their
Web sites to “fight isolationism and to make their voices heard,” thus
connecting with readers who share their ideological views. We believe
that the main importance of the Internet for recent Latin American
writers is the use of cyberspace as a communication and distribution

tool and not as something that will radically change the structure of
literature or help writers create post-national communities that will
disengage them from their locality.
A third aspect of the posnationalista writers is their apparent dis-
interest in politics, specifically in advancing political positions as a
response to social problems. The association of lo izquierdista (the
Left) with the Boom, and the suggestion that contemporary writers
have “no interest in representing a specific ideology” (Fuguet and
Gómez 17) has become one of the main characteristics of this lit-
erature. As Volpi argues in El insomnio de Bolívar, “All the writers
born after the 1970s share a the same distrust of politics (or at least
institutional politics). Almost all of them grew up under the shadow
of dictatorial or authoritarian regimes . . . but unlike their forefathers
[the Boom writers], they were not interested in revolutionary com-
mitment, clandestine groups, or ideological conviction. Instead, they
sought refuge in a deep indifference towards topics of public interest”
(180). Though some critics have classified this position as “insensi-
tive” to the political realities of the region, as the result of the writers’
class origin, or simply as these authors having surrendered themselves
to the logic of the neoliberal market, selfishly becoming more inter-
ested in being consumers than in denouncing the effects of the market
(Palaversich 36), which is not necessarily the case. The judgment is
not totally unfounded as the rejection of the political projects associ-
ated with previous generations is palpable in many texts regardless of
the cultural or regional history from which they originate. Fonseca’s
study of the role of the letrado in a Colombia that has seen dramatic
changes due to the drug trade emphasizes the substitution of ideol-
ogy and action for drug money. In the chapter devoted to Portela’s
fiction, González explores how the Cuban author navigates between
left- and rightwing political discourses, as if between Scylla and
Charybdis, in search of a position “outside” of politics. Tired of the
canonical revolutionary and/or antirevolutionary literary tradition
that precedes her, and not wishing to turn the Cuban political system
into a “tourist attraction” for her readers, Portela avoids taking any
position for or against the Castro regime. However, if these writers’
resistance to follow the “committed literature” road is obvious and at
times explicitly stated, what is more difficult to detect is the path they
wish to follow. For obviously they possess an ideology, but as Arriaga
shows in the case of Yolanda Arroyo, it is not an ideology that can be
expressed—as the Boom writers did—with a combined defense of the
national culture. As the editors of the present collection see it, one of
the main characteristics of this generation of writers is not so much

their rejection of politics, as it is the feeling the traditional political
parties/political views in Latin America cannot be trusted to express
their ideologies.
Finally, the fourth and most important epochal change is Post-
Nationalism, or the effects of the dissolution of the nation-state dis-
course. Usually associated and discussed in relation to globalization
and other social changes, the opinion among critics about the impor-
tance of post-nationalism seems divided. Some believe that a defining
characteristic of recent fiction is that writers are openly “rejecting” to
use as setting for their work “their countries of origin, or even Latin
America in general” (González, “Más allá” 51). For them, Borges
who argued that Latin American writers should not confine them-
selves to local topics and that “we must believe that the universe is
our birthright and try out every subject” (427) would be a prophet,
even if that means misreading him (see Hidalgo’s essay). There are
others, however, for whom this detaching of Latin American authors
from the nation is not as widespread as it appears to be. No doubt
many fictional texts written in the last three decades fit the descrip-
tion of post-national fiction in which neither the main characters nor
the places in which the action takes place appear to have nothing
to do with the authors’ nations of origin. On the one hand, some
of the Crack group’s works such as Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor (In
Search of Klingsor, 1999) and Padilla’s Amphitryon (2000), look
for “foreign” characters and places, and the same can be said about
Roberto Bolaño’s and Alberto Fuguet’s stories, among many other
texts. Rodrigo Fresán’s Jardines de Kensington (Kensington Gardens,
2003) is a prime example of this, as the author sets the narration
in a context, London, that he has never experienced. One ought to
notice as well that many Latin American writers are transient them-
selves, although Spain (a publishing center) and the United States
(an academic center) have now replaced France as cultural magnets.
Although this is certainly nothing new and some of the Boom writers
also chose to live outside their nations, the new generation does not
feel the need to justify their choice.
On the other hand, as Regalado points out in his chapter “less
than a dozen [of Crack group’s] novels avoid local topics, while
the rest has as main protagonists leaders of the Mexican indepen-
dence movement . . . central figures of the Mexican Revolution . . . or
contemporary [Mexican] writers.” However, it is not a question of
counting the number of works that have a Latin American nation as
the main setting, but of recognizing the importance of the culture
and place of origin on determining an artist’s worldview. We argue

that the disappearance of the nation as a “setting” or of national
characters is nothing but one type of literary manifestation of the
end of the nation-state form as the embodiment of local or regional
culture. It is perhaps the most evident sign of a new world view, but
not necessarily the only or most important one. We also would like
to argue that recognizing post-nationalism as the main characteristic
of this generation does not mean that we perceive these authors as
detached intellectuals capable of being disconnected to the influence
from their place of origin. What it does mean is that one can no lon-
ger read them without first having to rethink our definition of that
place of origin as something other than the nation. The posnaciona-
lista generation has emerged at a time when the nation-state model
has begun to lose its effectiveness and at the same time desperately
fights for its own survival. The erosion of the nation-state model
we have experienced since the last decades of the twentieth century
has had the effect of forcing the nation to be even more insistent on
policing its territory, increasing its surveillance. We are astounded
at the way the nation-state has been able to control cyberspace,
which initially appeared to promise an escape from the constraints
of traditional citizenship by allowing users to create alternate forms
of imagined communities. Not only has the nation-state been suc-
cessful at restricting its territory’s access to information that would
interfere with the production of ideal citizens, but also the nation-
state now actively recruits individuals with such advanced technical
knowledge as to be capable of waging cyber attacks as part of the
national defense system. Whether these new Latin American intel-
lectuals focus on global popular culture, avoid using national settings
or topics, challenge magical realism or other essentialist notions of
culture, or reject old political projects of alternatives to capitalist
development, they are all manifesting a resistance to nationalist dis-
course and its strategies of control.
When Fuguet rejects the idea of writing national sagas or symboli-
cally representing the nation in his writings, we see a parallel with
the questioning of the monuments and public spaces with which the
nation-state seeks to create citizens. When García Canclini worries that
the state continues emphasizing high-culture and ignores the popu-
lar culture, which he says shapes the mind of most Latin American
subjects, Canclini is employing the notion of national citizen, of a
“sense of belonging” fostered and regulated by the nation-state with
its symbols and laws. When Trelles employs as title for his anthol-
ogy, “the future is not ours,” he is rejecting an idea of the future as
a continuation of the national form now in crisis. And yet, whether

the result of the crumbling discourse of the nation is “alternative
nationalisms,” a withdrawing into private life, the creation of virtual
communities or a complete lack of social commitment, posnacionalis-
tas have one thing in common: the realization that the discourse of
the nation is unable to express each individual author’s experiences.
Their evaluation of the canon, especially but not exclusively, the work
of the Boom writers and their aesthetic projects, is not uniform. The
McOndo preface rejects magical realism, Trelles sees in the work of
the group of writers he anthologized a critique of the notion of the
“total novel,” while the Crack group see their texts as a continuation
of the structures and textual difficulty the Boom was known for.
What they all have in common, however, is their perception of the
insufficiency of the national culture paradigm to convey their sense of
locality.2 If the Boom was preoccupied with the spread of capitalism
and capitalist culture, twenty-first-century writers have shifted their
attention to the nation-state as a problem.
Notes
1. See Nicholson’s and McClennen’s proposal to use the term
“Generation of 73” for the Post-Boom period and their complex
description of the issues facing this group of writers.
2. On the notion of locality, contrasted to the nation-state discourse,
see Appadurai’s Chapters 8 and 9.
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Press, 1996.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York:
Viking, 1998.
Fresán, Rodrigo. “Apuntes (y algunas notas al pie) para una teoría del estigma:
páginas sueltas del posible diario de un casi ex joven escritor sudameri-
cano.” Palabra de América. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2004. 47–74.
Fuguet, Alberto. “¿Novelas McOndo? Giving Up The Ghosts.” 15 Dec.
2007. Alberto Fuguet: Escritor/Lector. Web. September 15, 2013. http://
albertofuguet.blogspot.com
Fuguet, Alberto and Sergio Gómez. “Presentación del país McOndo.”
McOndo. Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996.
García Canclini, Néstor. Consumers and Citizens. Trans. George Yudice.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.
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del siglo XXI: Introducción.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 46.1 (2012):
51–53.
Nicholson, Brantley and Sophia A. McClennen. “The Generation of ’72:

Latin America’s Forced Global Citizens.” A Contracorriente. 10.1 (2012):
1–17. Web. September 15, 2013. http://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu
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Taylor and Thea Pitman. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007,
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Hispamérica 12.36 (1983): 3–19.
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Ayacucho, 1977.
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2009.
Chapter 1
From the Mexican Onda to McOndo:

The Shifting Ideology of Mass Culture
Timothy R. Robbins
S ince the introduction of radio in Latin America in the 1930s—and,

later, of television in the 1950s—mass culture has become a vital part
of Latin American identity, and as such has also become an important
part of Latin American narratives. It is possible to view two different
reactions regarding the significance of this new medium of informa-
tion and leisure in these narratives. On one hand, the texts of the
1960s Mexican Onda authors, including José Agustín and Héctor
Manjárrez, give the cultural imperialist argument, in which mass
culture serves as a part of the hegemonic domination of Western or
North American ideology, a place of central importance. However,
as the nature and access to mass culture changed in the early 1990s,
authors like Alberto Fuguet discarded the cultural imperialist criti-
cism to give way to a postmodern aesthetic that focused more on the
individual’s interaction with the text than on the societal implications
involved.
Coming a decade after the introduction of television, the group
of writers in Mexico known as the Onda were a generation that is
characterized by youth writing about youth culture. They were writ-
ing from a context in which globally, ideas of revolution and change
are gaining precedence and at a time in Mexico when the government
was striving to solidify a discourse of national identity in conjunc-
tion with protectionist policies that limited the influence of North
American mass culture.1
José Agustín, probably the most identifiable author of this gen-
eration, explores issues of youth and culture in his narratives. In La
tumba (The Tomb, 1964), Agustín uses mass culture to distinguish
16 Timothy R. Robbins
between an internal desire on the part of his protagonist, Gabriel

Gúia, to be an intellectual and his participation in the youth culture of
the 1960s. These two modes of experience—the intellectual and the
youth—prove conflictive. The novel, in fact, vacillates between these
modes, describing on the one hand the sexual exploits of Gabriel and
his rejection of his parents’ worldview while portraying his skills as a
narrator on the other hand. It suggests that the two processes, intel-
lectual activity and counterculture, are not mutually exclusive. Gabriel
as a protagonist is caught up in the licentious antiestablishment trend
of his generation, but he cannot inhibit his intellectual faculties, nor
does he feel he should. It is this intersection of circumstances that
drives him to the brink of his own destruction.
Gabriel’s intellectual abilities are evident throughout the narra-
tion. In fact, the novel begins with an episode in which his teacher,
on receiving a “tip” from one of his classmates, accuses Gabriel of
plagiarism on a creative writing assignment. The professor affirms
that Gabriel’s writing style “resembles Chekov a lot” (12).2 The fact
that he can pass off his own creation as that of a canonical author like
Chekov indicates both Gabriel’s literary capacity as well as his need
for such praise, however indirect it may be. Despite a snobbish façade,
Gabriel harbors a secret desire to be recognized by those who dictate
what “real” culture is.3
Throughout the novel, Gabriel strives to continue and improve his
literary production, trying his hand at various genres and themes;
that is, he does not just produce works worthy of being compared
to Chekov. At one point, the narrator says, “I decided to work at lit-
erature. To write a novel. I locked myself in my room almost all day,
writing chapters that I never liked and which ended up in the trash”
(62). Just as Gabriel is exploring his own identity as an adolescent, he
is at the same time exploring his intellectual identity. This exploration
provides an escape from his life. Gabriel declares his intention to pro-
duce a novel just after the death of his cousin Laura, thus throwing
himself into literature in order to overcome his grief.
As a way of fitting the societal idea of an intellectual, Gabriel
engages in pursuits that are expected of an intellectual, the principal
activity being his participation in the Modern Literary Circle, a group
of developing writers. As in many aspects of the novel, his participation
serves to highlight the differences and at times similarities between his
adolescent identity and his intellectual identity. Gabriel first becomes
interested in the Circle due to his sexual interest in Dora, who is
already involved in the group. His apparent indifference to the actual
From the Mexican Onda to McOndo 17
activities of the Circle is evident in his reaction to the first meeting.

Gabriel narrates that, after the introductory business,
[a] letter from Herr Kafka was read, but I did not pay attention to the
reader: his voice was a tempting invitation to strangulation. Then they
gave their opinions and I abstained for the same reason. But I could see
that Paco Kafka could be considered at best mediocre, just by basing
myself on the critique of the modernist literary circle . . . Later, a shady
looking kid put on some glasses to read: Sexual Brotherhood, dodecasyl-
lable poem with double rhyme and avoiding synaloepha dedicated to Julio
Enrique. And he martyred us with his rhymed disgrace. Regrettably, we
still had to suffer six more poems and their respective critiques. (26)
Not only does Gabriel despise the works of the members of his liter-
ary club, as his intellectual martyrdom attests, but he also feels he
can judge other authors like Kafka as merely mediocre writers based
on comments of the group members. In other words, his disdain for
the intellectual capacities of the literary circle and his own feelings of
superiority are such that if the members of the group are able to like
a certain author or topic then, for Gabriel, it cannot possibly have
any worth.
Gabriel’s feelings for the Circle, and indeed his whole attitude
about it is summed up in his thoughts, “Encephalic mass, or only
phallic?” (35). For Gabriel, the literary group is never a space of intel-
lectual activity, but rather one in which he can seek to further his
sexual education. For this reason, he decides to join it in the first
place. His social interest in the group far overshadows any intellectual
interest that he may have had at the very beginning. The Circle is just
one more activity in which Gabriel feels he should participate, but in
which he finds no satisfaction except possibly his ability to meet and
court the female members.
The meetings of the Literary Circle contrast markedly with another
of Gabriel’s activities, this time an activity more worthy of his status
as part of the bourgeois youth and a resistance to societal norms.
Throughout the novel, Gabriel throws parties and spends much of his
free time taking advantage of the club scene. It is also through these
activities that Gabriel explores his sexual side, having sexual encoun-
ters with numerous women, including his own aunt. The licentious
facet of Gabriel’s identity clearly connects with the countercultural
image that he wants to portray. The “rebel without a cause” façade
that Gabriel embodies, complete with a total lack of respect for his
parents, is thus best paired with partying, with sexual encounters,
and with mass culture: that is, with sex, drugs (alcohol), and rock
and roll.
Gabriel clearly has two divergent yet important elements in his
identity development: the intellectual who in turn is invaded by the
youth element. One must ask the question, then, how do the cultural
artifacts, both high and mass culture, that Gabriel consumes fit into
this construction? Do these artifacts reflect the differing elements of
his identity in an almost binary opposition, high culture belonging to
his intellectual identity and mass culture to his youthful side? Or, is
the interplay between these cultures even more complex?
Perhaps the easiest place to start is in examining the mass culture
that appears in the text. Gabriel is above all a music lover, so music
plays a very important role in the novel. In general, Agustín’s pro-
tagonist prefers the classical music of Wagner or others to the more
popular mass culture versions of rock and jazz. As an intellectual,
Gabriel’s tastes naturally lie with that most high culture of musical
productions, opera, and so when he is free to consume the form of
culture that he would prefer, he plays classical music. Juan Bruce-
Novoa has examined the connection between Agustín’s novel and
the most cited musical work it contains, Die Lohengrin by Wagner.
Bruce-Novoa claims that La tumba functions as a structural and the-
matic parody of the Wagnerian opera, to the point where the ideal
woman from the opera shares her name with the desired woman in
Agustín’s work. He goes on to argue that the differences between
the two works of art are where the parodic element lies: the fact that
Wagner’s opera takes place on a grand scale—Lohengrin is a god and
Elsa a noble—whereas Agustín’s novel occupies an impure middle
class. It is through this use of parody, says Bruce-Novoa, that Agustín
places himself clearly within the parodic tradition that encompasses
literature through the ages.
In looking at the idea of parody, then, it is another short step to
find a parody of appearances in his consumption of culture, both
mass and high. Gabriel consumes the type of culture that he is sup-
posed to in the contexts that he is supposed to, conforming to cultural
stereotypes and expectations. Thus, he reads French poetry and lis-
tens to classical music when he is exercising his role as intellectual,
but when he moves into the sphere of (subversive?) youth culture, he
switches to film, jazz, and even the “detestable” rock music.
In contrast to his taste for classical music, Gabriel many times looks
upon these mass culture forms with the same disdain, especially for
rock music, that he shows for the Literary Circle. The narrator tells
that “Laura did not like Solitude by Duke Ellington so she put on
some rock bought in a passing weakness” (54). Gabriel sees Laura’s

preference for rock as trite; in terms of mass culture, Gabriel himself
prefers one of the precursors of rock, and a genre that is closer to
being “canonized” as high culture, jazz, or goes one step further up
the hierarchy of taste to his beloved opera. When he goes out to buy
himself birthday presents with his father’s money, he buys albums by
Louis Armstrong, Nat Adderly (jazz), and Debussy and Grieg (clas-
sical music) rather than those of Elvis Presley, Neil Sedaka, or Bill
Haley, representatives of the rock and roll movement.
The place of rock and film in La tumba (as bastions of mass cul-
ture) is more as a backdrop to the parties throughout the novel. He
listens to rock as a manifestation of his countercultural youth iden-
tity; it is a social phenomenon—a way to show participation in the
youth movement. Rock and roll matters more for what it symbolizes,
youth and rebellion, than for its aesthetic qualities or even the mes-
sage in the songs; the protagonists of the novel do not pay attention
to what the songs say, they simply listen to them as a way of express-
ing a youth identity. This participation even infiltrates the language
Gabriel as the narrator uses. In talking about a party that he and
Laura attended at the senator’s house, Gabriel explains that, “we rock
and rolled without stopping” (58), and later in talking about his own
party, “. . . the band attacked a rock and roll song. My friends howled
with happiness when the hostilities began, dancing to it . . . It seems
like rock was a battle cry; guests began to flood in searching for high-
balls” (emphasis added, 88). Rock music takes on the combative tone
of the generation gap. To rock and roll is to embrace the youth cul-
ture, to defy authority, and to let oneself act unfettered by tradition.
In fact, during the party at the senator’s, Gabriel urinates in the sink
and breaks several objects in the house, another manifestation of his
disregard for propriety, property, and authority. As for the two par-
ties at his own house, after the first party, Gabriel spends the night
with his aunt, incest being the ultimate symbol of breaking with tra-
ditional societal values; following the second party, Gabriel’s father
criticizes him for spending the night with his girlfriend Elsa, once
again overtly flaunting the norms of society.
Gabriel’s case offers a very interesting contradiction between high
and low, domestic and foreign cultural productions. He is an intellec-
tual and as such ties himself to the traditional bastions of high culture
like the French poets, such as Rimbaud, and Western classical music.
At the same time, he is also a connoisseur of jazz and to a limited
extent rock and roll, showing the gaining importance of the North
American culture industries for Mexican middle class consumption.
He is a writer, but also a party animal. Gabriel shows the begin-

ning of the literary countercultural protagonist, who rejects paren-
tal (national?) authority in part through his choice of mass culture
and the manner in which it is consumed. Mass culture, then, in this
novel serves to highlight the personal, and to a large extent societal,
conflict between a disenchanted and frantic youth culture and the
concept of the intellectual. Gabriel truly enjoys his classical music and
the refinements of the so-called high culture, but in order to be a part
of the antiestablishment youth trend, plays loud rock music to annoy
his mother and also holds large parties where drinking, sex, jazz, and
rock and roll are the norm.4
In recognizing the highly capitalist nature of the mass culture
employed in the novels, the debate about cultural imperialism must
also be taken into account. The Onda texts, whether directly or indi-
rectly, must of necessity address the idea of cultural imperialism simply
because of their pronounced inclusion of the North American culture
industry. Implicitly, La tumba takes the cultural imperialist criticism
and questions it, indicating that whether it is a positive or a negative
phenomenon, American mass culture is a part of the Mexican youth
culture; there is no way around this. The Onda authors merely incor-
porate that reality into their fiction, portraying a true image of what
a certain Mexican youth experience is instead of trying to make their
fiction ultra-Mexican. José Agustín argues that, “some of us incor-
porate references or tools of film, rock, television, comics, dreams,
visions, dark novel and science fiction. In general there was a reinser-
tion of Mexican popular culture, even though it took a while to be
noticed. In the beginning it was seen as denationalization or tran-
sculturation” (“Onda” 10). Film, rock, television, in short, products
of the culture industry, all form a part of the national identity. Any
criticism that the Onda works include these factors do not recognize
the very nature of the youth experience.
Another way of looking at the inclusion of mass culture from the
cultural imperialist perspective is to see mass culture as questioning
the idea of national identity. These writers reject the rigid terms of
Mexican identity that has been constructed by the PRI through the
use of national heroes. As Eric Zolov has commented, mass culture
and rock and roll icons “not only offered new role models at home
but immediately overshadowed the official heroes of the Revolution,
whose own exaggerated masculinities had become an extension of the
patriarchal state” (28). Exploring mass culture, then, becomes a part
of what it means to explore the idea of Mexican identity. More spe-
cifically, the exploration of American mass culture, which could be
seen as a foreign invasion, is a way of resisting the controlling power

of the political revision of national identity. It is a way of expanding
the scope of identity in order to encompass a more complete view of
society as a whole.
Héctor Manjarrez, on the other hand, validates the cultural impe-
rialist argument in his texts, immersing himself in mass culture,
but providing an interesting contrast and comparison with the rock
and roll ethos of Agustín. Manjarrez sees mass culture as a force of
domination and thus as a threat to culture. One of his first works,
Acto propiciatorio (Propitiatory Gesture, 1970), contains a story
that could be seen as a heavy-handed metaphor of cultural imperial-
ism. In the first story of the collection, “Johnny,” the protagonist
of a North American Western leaves the television set to live with
a Mexican family that has been consuming the program. The bla-
tant implications of North American mass culture literally invading
Mexican family life could not be clearer.
In another of Manjarrez’s works, Lapsus (Lapsus, 1971), the author
returns to the topic of mass culture as a part of his exploration of
Mexican identity in a more nuanced way. In keeping with his caution-
ary vision of Acto propiciatorio, Manjarrez seeks to justify literature
in a world inundated with mass culture. At one point, he asks, “Why
the hell should one write a novel when it is obvious that for many
years now there is not a single novel that has changed the world, not
even a little . . . when a film by Godard (let’s say) and a song by Mick
Jagger (let’s say) transform many more people” (217–218). This direct
dialogue with mass culture provides a forum as well as a separation
between the two types of cultural productions. In fact, the work that
Manjarrez writes is a response to the question that is posed, the rel-
evance of literature in a world of mass media.
Mass culture serves to question the position of youth resistance.
As occurs with the novels of Agustín, North American rock is associ-
ated with youth culture. Manjarrez’s novel presents a set of impres-
sions revolving around the lives and connections of two Mexicans
living abroad: Huberto Haltter and Humberto Heggo. In looking
at these two characters, mass culture serves to question the position
of youth resistance. Thus Huberto, the younger counterpart of the
Heggo–Haltter relationship, listens to the Doors and the Beatles and
the first impression of him describes him walking, “through hallways
literally soaked with Muzak, murmuring some jazz and hard rock
albums, sucking up a milkshake, smoking with a solemn expression
of savoire-faire, leafing through a Playboy” (12). Huberto from the
beginning presents the image of the youth, humming hard rock music
to counteract the Muzak and reading Playboy, the essential metaphor

of sexual liberation. Even in his physical presentation, Huberto strives
to incorporate mass culture, with its youth culture as resistance ideol-
ogy. Huberto represents the youth and the mass culture in the novel
facilitates this description of him. He gets his image from the culture
industry and in a sense, the mass culture determines his identity. In
speaking about Huberto, the narrator also states that, “[h]e learned
to be cool: modeling himself a little on photos of Charlie Bird Parker
and Mick Jagger” (233). North American mass culture determines
Huberto’s physical appearance as well as his language and his habits.
Although mass culture here is seen as an indicator of the youth cul-
ture, it also works as a form of domination, dictating Huberto’s taste
and identity.
As part of this youth identity, which is manifested in the mass cul-
ture that he consumes and imitates, Huberto also adopts a countercul-
tural philosophy—that of dropping out of society. Alternatively, the
older Humberto chooses a more active form of counterculture. The
narrator relates that, “both [Huberto and Humberto] tend to adopt
anarchic attitudes . . . those of Haltter tend towards drop-outism”
(87).5 At this point, it is helpful to recall what the two protagonists are
struggling with ideologically. The novel can be seen as a discourse on
the idea of Mexican identity; both protagonists have a profound preoc-
cupation with what it means to be Mexican, especially as a Mexican
living abroad. The narrator explains that:
Huberto Haltter and Humberto Heggo are Mexicans; id est, citizens

of a country that tries to seduce History with countless international
conferences, sporting events, congresses, conventions, essays and
newspaper reports for internal consumption about the incredible popu-
larity of the country and its music in the world . . . Neither completely
underdeveloped, nor close to development. Neither democratic, nor
a dictatorship (At the date of writing, mind you). Neither guided by a
de Gaulle nor a Castro. Neither producing a Che Guevara, a Ho Chi
Minh, a Mao . . . Huberto and Humberto are Mexicans, and bourgeois
Mexicans; in other words, their historical moment took place one hun-
dred or one hundred and fifty years ago. (20–21)
Mexican identity is stuck in a realm of insignificance: it is neither

industrialized enough to form a part of the world elite, nor is it so
underdeveloped to merit notice as a part of the third world; it has not
produced significant thinkers nor political leaders. In short, Mexico
is a forgotten land that is trying to raise its global prestige through
international events like the Olympics of 1968 and the later World
Cup Finals of 1970. This position of insignificant national identity

leads Huberto and Humberto to look outside the national boundar-
ies for a feeling of participation. Huberto, for instance, expresses an
empathy with the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. The narra-
tion goes on to explain why Huberto feels this affinity: the indefinite
position of Mexico is a subaltern position. He states, “look man I’m
Latin-American, dig that, I’m Third World, right?, see whadda mean
cat, like Stokeley here jes said (and Stokeley -is- an honorable man) Che
Guevara is I repeat IS the greatest black, man black is not a color, but
a condition” (190).
The social conscience of Huberto that is exemplified in this quote
and the culture industry that forms his habits and appearance are
never completely separate. The narrator includes a list of items related
to Humberto and Huberto. Politics and mass culture mix freely in the
visual manifestation of Huberto’s personality. From the posters of the
Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa to the more politicized posters of the
French student movement, the North American antiwar movement,
the Black Panther movement, and Latin American protest/socialist
movements, these posters connect a taste for North American rock
with a social conscience. The political–mass culture connection is
emphasized even more by the narrator who relates that Huberto will
die soon and that his death will benefit a group of unknown persons.
At this point, the narrator asks, “[a]n existential pop star, baby? A pop
cult? The James Dean/Jim Morrison/Mick Jagger/Eldrideg Cleaver
that never was?” (29) In combining the cult of James Dean and Jim
Morrison with the more overtly political Eldridge Cleaver, the nar-
rator reinforces the interaction between mass culture and politics, at
the same time indicating that mass culture is a form of politics. The
other side of this, the existential pop star, is the fact that in many
cases, political figures become appropriated by the culture industry
as well; the case of Che Guevara, who is mentioned by several of the
Onda writers, is perhaps the best example of this. Che becomes a
bourgeois appropriation of the idea of revolution and rebellion and
in time comes to serve capitalist means through the dissemination of
t-shirts, posters, figurines, etc., at the same time that he continues to
be a powerful symbol of revolutionary ideals.
Humberto, the other link in the Haltter–Heggo connection, is a
middle-aged architect who decides to give it all up and live the protest
youth lifestyle. At one point, Humberto ponders his former middle
class lifestyle, stating, “why did I think that I was Decent because
I had good taste and had Liberal tendencies? . . . and what the fuck
made me think that I was virtuous and somehow superior because my
house was a nice house? The New Yorker, Playboy, Better Homes &
Gardens? Ramparts? Burn the USA, burn baby burn” (126–127).
Humberto leaves his comfortable lifestyle, and his family, to live the
counterculture. His rejection of middle-class Mexican conformity
comes through a rejection of the symbols of status, The New Yorker,
Playboy, Better Homes & Gardens, but most of all through a rejection
of North American imperialism. That is, he rejects what for Mexican
society of this moment were seen as symbols of the upper class, mainly
foreign mass culture.6 It is because of this that Heggo decides to travel
to Vietnam, but also leads him to the drug culture. It is important to
note that Humberto does not feel an intimate connection with the
products of the culture industry, which other writers and protago-
nists take to be symbols of rebellion. Even though he participates in
the countercultural drug experience, he sees North American mass
culture as a symbol of his social class, of which he seeks to liberate
himself. This distancing from mass culture is an important one in
separating Heggo from Haltter.
Manjarrez, in his texts, treads the fine line between recogniz-
ing mass culture as having the potential for resistance—the case of
Huberto and Humberto exemplifying this idea—and the belief that
above all mass culture is a form of domination, both as a force of
cultural imperialism as well as a way of controlling thought. Looking
at the novel in this light, one could even argue that the representa-
tions of mass culture connected to rebellion and revolution are merely
appropriations that allow the individual (especially Haltter) to espouse
a revolutionary lifestyle without really living it. The contrast to this
would be Heggo, the part of the duo who does not identify him-
self with mass culture, but who lives a more revolutionary lifestyle,
actively traveling to Vietnam as protest. Manjarrez himself refers to
this in talking about the attitude that both Haltter and Heggo take
regarding their countercultural activities. While Haltter engages in
drop-outism, the narrator states that, “it is honourable to signal that
the [attitude] of Humberto is much more original; few people of
his generation have taken disillusionment to a conclusion” (87). As
opposed to the vision of Agustín, in which mass culture is a form of
rebellion, Manjarrez opens up a space in which through a rejection
of mass culture, as a form of cultural imperialism, true revolution can
take place.
In looking at the changes that occur between when the Mexican
Onda authors were writing and contemporary authors such as Alberto
Fuguet, one could argue that there is a general critique of centralized
structures of authoritarian power at many different levels. Politically,
both Argentina and Chile see a transition from authoritarian dicta-

torships in the 1970s to more democratic forms of government in the
1980s and 1990s. Additionally, economic policies in Latin America
generally tend to become less nationally centered and protectionist—
as was the case with the import substitution industrialization policies
of the 1960s and 1970s—and are replaced with neoliberal free mar-
ket policies. These neoliberal policies have ramifications for the cul-
ture industry in Latin America. From its introduction to Argentina
in 1951 and Chile in 1959, television has gone from largely public
ownership to the private sector. Dianne Johnson examines the evolu-
tion of media ownership and finds that in connection with the shift
from public to private, media outlets also shift from domestic own-
ership to foreign and there is an increasing concentration of media
outlets in a few corporations (127–134). Although Johnson argues
that Latin American media structures become increasingly less con-
nected to national government and more dependent on foreign influ-
ences through the deregulation process, she concludes that “the
state can balance the loss of sovereign control through its regulation
of the media. Thus despite the very real influence of international
trends, domestic factors remain important in public policymaking”
(138–139). The situation that Johnson describes regarding mass
culture is thus more multifaceted than that which confronted the
Onda authors.
In conjunction with the opening of economic markets and the
destabilization of authoritarian political power, one sees an increased
concern with the very idea of national identity in a postmodern con-
text. Néstor García Canclini sees the globalizing postmodern state
of Latin America as one in which national identity and boundaries
are destabilized as well. He proposes that, “Latin America is losing
its national projects. The loss of control over the economies in differ-
ent countries is evident in the disappearance of the national currency
(Ecuador, El Salvador) or in the frequency of devaluations (Brazil,
Mexico, Peru, Venezuela)” (Hybrid xxxvii), and later theorizes that,
“postmodern identities are transterritorial and multilinguistic. They
are structured less by the logic of the state than by that of markets”
(Consumers 29).
It is important to recognize that not all theorists view this shift
from national to transterritorial postmodern identity as a positive
thing. Beatriz Sarlo, in her book Scenes of Postmodern Life (1994),
describes postmodern life thus: “[t]elevision is broadcast twenty-four
hours Daily, on fifty channels, while the school system is in disar-
ray, having to make do without either symbolic prestige or material
resources” (5). The postmodern experience that Sarlo describes is

one saturated in mass culture, where economic means determine
consumption and critical thinking takes a secondary role to passive
consumption. It is the culture of television, zapping, videos games,
and the flow of information.7 Additionally, Santiago Colás has argued
that what separates a postmodern sensibility from that of a modern
world view is precisely the relationship that each maintains with mass
culture; modernism defines itself in opposition to mass culture, while
postmodernism seeks a blending or fusion with it (ix). No matter the
position they take, most theories of postmodern cultural production
must take into account the importance of mass culture in daily life
and how the individual reacts with or to this state of increased avail-
ability of information and mass culture products.
What becomes evident in looking at the narratives of Alberto
Fuguet in the context of globalization and postmodernity is the pre-
occupation with the idea of personal identity—both in relation to the
local/national as well as the cosmopolitan/global—in a way that dis-
cards the older preoccupation with systems of power involved in the
Onda cultural imperialist dialogue. What Fuguet expresses through
his exploration of mass culture in the globalized milieu is the power
of mass culture in a postmodern context to perpetuate the status quo
through a feeling of false advocacy or through a feeling of apathy and
lack of control. In essence, mass culture for these authors fills the
void brought about by the destabilization of the various structures
of power.
Alberto Fuguet initially received much attention due to his rejec-
tion of the Boom in general and magical realism specifically as a valid
form of expression for his generation of Latin American writers. From
the introduction to the anthology McOndo (1996), Fuguet explains
that many Latin Americans live in a social and historical context that
is fully entrenched in the postmodern world that Sarlo and Colás
speak of, which is also part of the globalizing trend. As Fuguet states,
the McOndo writers, “are post-everything: post-modern, post-yuppie,
post-communism, post-babyboomers, post-ozone layer. There is no
magical realism here, there is virtual realism” (“Presentación” 14).
Another aspect that Fuguet highlights is the fierce individuality of
the narratives. He explains that “[t]he stories of McOndo focus on
individual and private realities. We suppose that this is the inheri-
tance of the worldwide privatizing fever . . . these writers worry less
about their public contingency and have retired for some time to
their personal quarters. They are not social frescos nor collective
sagas” (“Presentación” 13). The process that Fuguet describes is not
so much a transition from national to individual, public to private

narratives, but rather a transition away from narratives that attempt
to understand the national experience to ones that describe the con-
joint processes of postmodernism and globalization. Néstor García
Canclini would describe this process as a loss of the national, replaced
by the global. In a quote that is appropriate in light of the McOndo
narratives, García Canclini states that, “Culture becomes a process of
multinational assemblage, a flexible articulation of parts, a montage
of features, that any citizen in any country, of whatever religion or
ideology can read and use” (Consumers 17–18). McOndo does not
pretend to be totalizing social narratives, but rather to focus on the
individual experience.
While Fuguet claims a new aesthetic in Latin American literature,
in looking at his literary production the comparison with the Onda
writers is particularly striking.8 Fuguet writes of youth rebellion and
inundates his novels with images of youth engaging in sex, listening
to US rock music, and watching US films, as well as doing drugs,
especially cocaine. The youth involved are upper middle to upper
class, and many times never venture out of their own isolated areas of
the city. As also occurs with the Onda, these youth display a marked
irreverence and even rejection of authority figures, both national and
familial. Thus, much like the Onda writers, Fuguet expresses a gen-
erational ethos that simply takes into account youth experiences in
Chile during the 1980s and 1990s, which includes the cliché of sex,
drugs, and rock and roll.
As a part of this specifically upper middle class generational ethos,
the protagonists in his novels also struggle with their own identity,
especially as it pertains to youth and childhood as well as to outside
influences. The characters in Fuguet’s novels wander without direction.
His first novel, Mala onda (Bad Vibes, 1991), begins with the narrator,
Matías, preparing to return to Chile after a school trip to Brazil. The
distance involved in the school trip creates a space in which Matías can
examine his national identity, something that Fuguet expresses in an
interview, stating, “the kid had to leave to return and see his personal
relationships and the country, to realize that his friends, his parents
and the government were going from bad to worse” (García Corales
289).9 As Matías prepares to return to his mundane life, he expresses
his disillusionment through a mass culture metaphor:
It was like this big anticipation, big buildup and then nothing. As if all
the bullshitting and fun and going out in Rio with Cassia and the beach
and the drinking and the pot and everything just went away, never
happened. As if, in a dream or something, someone pushed Record

instead of Play and erased what was on my favorite tape forever . . . Shit.
I’m back for good. Now I’m back in Chile. (28)
This dissatisfied, yet apathetic reaction is juxtaposed with the histori-

cal moment at which the novel occurs. Mala onda takes place imme-
diately before the plebiscite in 1980. This referendum was a crucial
moment in Chilean history, as the country was able to vote for the
first time since Augusto Pinochet took power in 1973. The plebiscite
would approve a new constitution, which gave the president broad
powers, to replace the one from 1925. Upon passing, this consti-
tution ultimately allowed the government of Pinochet to maintain
power for another eight years. The political climate provides a back-
ground to the novel, yet the reaction of Matías and the other protago-
nists is also revealing. As Ivonne Cuadra points out, the social class
to which Matías belongs is precisely the sector of society that allows
Pinochet to maintain his power (58–59). In addition to this, Matías
and his peers have little to no memory of the Allende government
and subsequent coup that placed Pinochet in control. For them, the
dictatorial state under which they live is normal.
Another significant point upon which nearly all critics agree is that
Matías and the other protagonists in the novel live isolated in their
upper-class neighborhoods, finding little connection with the rest of
the city nor with the rest of the nation. Matías connects more with
his North American dreams than he does with his Chilean reality.
Chile and Santiago are the fusion of North American culture as status
symbol within a limited geographic and socioeconomic space. Thus,
Matías is well versed on the music of the Bee Gees and Rod Stewart,
as well as symbols of economic status through consumption of for-
eign luxury products. Although less pronounced than in Por favor,
rebobinar (Please Rewind, 1998), or Las películas de mi vida (The
Movies of My Life, 2002), the narrator of Mala onda feels the need
to classify items with their brand name, typically foreign, in an effort
to highlight the level of his consumption.10 Chocolate syrup is not
chocolate syrup but rather Nestle and one does not get gas at a gas
station, but rather a Seven Eleven. Foreign goods are equated with
quality while national production and goods are seen as less valuable
or inauthentic. Matías takes this position to the extent that he relates
an experience of the Pumper Nic:
The smell of french fries, of grease, engulfs me. I like it. It’s the smell
of the United States, I think. The smell of progress. . . . it makes me
think of Orlando and Disney World, of Miami, of McDonald’s and

Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Carl’s Jr and Jack-
in–the-Box. Pumper Nic—even the name sounds pathetic to me, way
too third-world. It isn’t all that bad, but it’s a bad copy, that’s the
thing. It’s not authentic. (93)
Progress is conformity with the ultimate symbol of North American

influence and globalization, McDonald’s. The Chilean version can-
not compete with the “authentic” experience of North American fast
food. In the realm of mass culture, this is emphasized by the complete
lack of Latin American products; the only Latin American musician
that even appears in the novel is mentioned by the American surfer
Rusty Ratcliff. Through his reflections on consumption, Matías is
constantly looking outward to find worth and meaning; the foreign
replaces the local for him.
This outward gaze applies to political discourse in the novel as
well, showing the apathy that Matías feels toward the upcoming
plebiscite specifically and political matters in general. In one of the
many scenes at Juancho’s, Matías reflects at length about music. After
this, Alejandro Paz, the barman who adores the United States, asks
about the plebiscite, to which Matías says he will not vote because he
is not of age. Paz presses him, to which Matías responds, “I’d have to
think about it” (58). His unwillingness to dwell into the realm of the
political is emphasized by the way that he approaches literary texts as
well. As Cristián Opazo argues, Matías “looks for books where the
detours of family discipline are references to his own detours and
not representations of the crises (political and teleological) that are
observed on the macroscopic level in the Chilean society of 1980”
(83). Matías puts more effort into understanding mass culture than
he does in participating in any sort of national process, and mass cul-
ture is a symbol for the idealized United States as one end of the value
spectrum, where Chile inhabits the lower end. He, in fact, states that
the United States is, “a country where everything happens, where
nobody notices you, nobody judges you, zero opinions, and full of
things you never dreamed of” (56). The United States becomes a type
of locus amoenus for Matías, an unrealistic dream vision of perfection.
This dream allows him to distance himself from his actual situation
and lose himself in his construction of the foreign.
The dream vision of North America that Matías holds contrasts
starkly with that of Chile as a backward, retrograde country. After
returning from Rio de Janeiro, Matías expresses his regret at coming
back, and he later emphasizes his dislike of Chile, stating, “if only
Santiago had freeways and highways to roar down: I could get up

to 100, maybe even 110, on my parents’ Accord. But Santiago is in
Chile and the only things we have are those four-way intersections
and endless, useless traffic circles packed with cars going round and
round and round” (48). Chile is described by its lack of infrastructure
and access. As Agustín Pastén argues, “Throughout the entire novel,
the adjective ‘chileno/a’ is utilized every time the first person narrat-
ing voice wishes to attach a negative quality onto an object or reality”
(10). Matías rejects the local as stagnant and backward, favoring the
global, in his glorification of North American rock and film, as the
symbol of progress and success. Through his experience of Brazil,
Matías is able to see the status quo in Chile as something undesirable,
although he cannot make the intuitive leap to connect the Pinochet
regime with Chile’s inferior status.
Lynell Williams sees this as an articulation of the cultural imperial-
ist argument, that North American cultural goods are “colonizing”
Matías’s Santiago (18). While there is a definite preference for North
American cultural goods and a decided rejection of local production,
the novel does not portray this as simple cultural imperialism. There
is, however, a marked critique of the upper class and their conspicu-
ous consumption, but the rejection of the local in favor of the global
has more to do with the general apathy and lack of strong national
identity—that is, it is a by-product of the loss of national identity
that García Canclini connects with postmodernism—than any effect
of the hegemonic practices of the North American culture industry.
The lack of direction or national identity for the upper-class Matías
is expressed through his sense of apathy and void of purpose. The
title of the novel Mala onda describes Matías’s emotional state in
the novel. At one point, this apathetic state reaches such a point that
Matías rejects even the act of thinking:
I’m still bored—bored, fed up. Even thinking is a monumental effort.

This is already more than typical, and it has me worried. Thoughts
that attack me, conversations that bury me, opinions I listen to, para-
graphs I read, it’s all the same to me, it’s all too much for me. Like,
so much anguish, it really bothers me. I’m bored, fed up. I can’t even
dare to think. Thinking gives me ideas. I have too many of those
already. (156)
It is clear that Matías struggles with a sense of purpose in the novel,

many times appealing to foreign mass culture as a more authentic
form. North American music, movies, and television allow Matías to
escape his own insecurity.
He finds a sense of superiority through his knowledge of US mass

culture, showing ample evidence that he works toward a mastery of
this subject. Matías goes to the local record store, Circus, to review
the Billboard charts, he reads the Village Voice and Rolling Stone
magazine when he can and prides himself on his facility with mass
culture. He even uses this informal knowledge as a way of belittling
the school experience in general and his English professor specifi-
cally. Matías states that, “God, how annoying—I know more than
the teacher does. She can barely turn on a stereo, probably doesn’t
even know what Rolling Stone is” (175). While US mass culture gives
Matías a way of improving his own self-worth, it also gives him a
space through which he can distance himself from the local context
in which he finds himself.
Matías idealized dream vision of the United States is complicated
by his interactions with American surfer Rusty Ratliff, who is inte-
grated into the group of Matías’s friends. While Matías values US mass
culture, he has less use for Americans themselves. He even complains
of the others’ idolization of Rusty, stating “[Nacho] thinks that just
being next to him and Rusty, who’s all blond and American, he rises
in stature. That it makes his stock go up and increases his possibili-
ties of transcending me and my world” (158–59). Matías conveniently
ignores the fact that through his “expertise” in North American cul-
ture he essentially does the same thing. Matías later observes how
Rusty exploits his position as exotic other: “Rusty . . . talked with
that accent he knows so well how to use, and he shook his hair as if
he were the only person on earth with a mane like that” (163). In
addition to being the exotic American, Rusty also has the benefit of
having a “bad boy” mystique; at one point, one of Matías’s group of
friends explains that Rusty was expelled from Spain for burning a
professor’s car.
For Matías, it is not proximity to the United States in general, but
rather knowledge of American pop culture that has value. On a more
basic level, Rusty represents for Matías what he cannot be. While
Matías can acquire knowledge of the United States, perpetuating
his ideal dream vision, he cannot be a part of the United States like
Rusty. This gives Rusty an edge, and makes Matías jealous of him. It
is a point that is accentuated by Rusty, when he explains who Charly
García is by dismissively stating, “Latin Americans like him” (203).
Rusty manifests his distance from Latin America in a way that Matías
can never hope to achieve. While Matías might belittle his native
country and immerse himself more in foreign mass culture than in
his national identity, he will always be perceived as Latin American.
Thus, his jealousy over Rusty is due more to his own feelings of loss
and inadequacy due to his inability to “authentically” be American
than it is to any dislike of the United States itself.
Given his fascination with the United States and its culture, it
comes as little surprise that Matías eventually finds his missing sense
of purpose and belonging through the Salinger novel, Catcher in the
Rye (1951). A gift from another self-proclaimed American expert,
Alejandro Paz, Matías initially rejects the novel, not wanting to read
it. When he finally does open its pages, it is a complete revelation for
him: “Last night I met Holden Caulfield. It was like a chemical reac-
tion or something, totally mesmerizing. I really couldn’t believe what
happened. Now at least I didn’t feel so alone—finally, I felt a little bet-
ter. I had found a new friend—my new best friend, my twin” (209).
Matías finds an affinity with the rebellious youth from Salinger’s
novel. It is not an illogical pairing, as in fact Matías and Caulfield
do have a lot in common. Both are wandering as self-proclaimed
outcasts in their own society and both are looking for a way to make
their lives have meaning. His “discovery” of Caulfield and the further
breach that he feels with his family will lead Matías to leave his home.
The fact that when he flees, Matías chooses to take only his copy of
Catcher in the Rye and his valium are evidence of both his naiveté
as well as the things he values most, the ideal of rebellion found in
Holden Caulfield and his chemical dependency.
The rupture with Matías’s family, however, is tinged with his own
selfishness and reliance on his upper-class upbringing. Matías cannot
completely discard his social class, something that quickly becomes
evident in his bus journey, which takes him further and further from
the familiar geography that he knows so well. As Matías travels away
from his center, he grows increasingly uncomfortable in midst of
Santiago’s lower economic sectors. His journey through Santiago also
emphasizes his feelings of not belonging. He explains that, “I just sat
there, looking out the window like a hapless tourist” (258). Matías is
the tourist, there to see the sights, but to later return to more familiar
scenes. He even carries his stereotypes of the poor with him, imag-
ining that one of his co-passengers is carrying a knife and is simply
waiting to kill him. It is not until Matías returns to the upper class
neighborhoods that he finds familiar—and incidentally which also
enable accessibility to the mass culture that gives Matías his sense of
superiority—that he can relax.
The ending of the novel accentuates the position that Matías
finds himself in. He has returned to the familiar world of upper-
class accommodation and is happy to passively exist in this context,
essentially giving up on his rebellion and returning to the familial

home.11 His attitude, which embraces the stable yet distasteful life
with his family instead of the rebellious call for action, is paralleled in
his reflections on the referendum. Matías highlights the passivity of
his actions, stating:
The “SI” won, with 67.6 percent of the vote. Ironcially, nobody in

my family was able to muster up the desire to vote . . . There were far
too many people, crowds and crowds of entire families, and every-
one was running out into the street to celebrate the future, toasting
the economic stability and the promise that nothing bad would ever
happen to Chile . . . I’d like to think, now that the troubles have sub-
sided a little, that we’re in for some calm, maybe even peaceful times
ahead. (305–306)
Civic (and in Matías’s case, familial) tranquility is more important

than belief or morality and Matías is happy to resume his position as
a pseudo-victim of domination if it ensures stability. He even does so
with the hope that the future will be better. In the end, according
to Matías, what matters is that, “I guess I have made it. / For now”
(335).12
Matías’s comportment is reminiscent of the situation described
by Slavoj Žižek. From a Marxist perspective that is heavily influ-
enced by Lacan, Žižek describes the way in which apparatuses of
resistance or action actually work to maintain the status quo, giv-
ing the individual the impression of being proactive. In describing
the postmodern state, what he calls the stage of cultural capitalism,
Žižek states that, “ideology functions more and more in a fetish-
istic mode as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode” (First
as Tragedy 65). For Žižek, the fetish serves to enable the rational
realist subject to confront a reality that does not conform to their
ideological stance. The fetish becomes a form of escapism, allowing
the individual to project his/her “real” self into the fetish, disavow-
ing the more common experiences. In this sense, fetish is to be
understood more as the ideological apparatus that is sometimes, but
not always embodied in a material possession rather than the object
itself. To highlight this idea, Žižek uses the example of Starbucks
and its advertising. He argues that:
The “cultural” surplus is here spelled out: the price is higher than
elsewhere since what you are really buying is the “coffee ethic” which
includes care for the environment, social responsibility towards the
producers, plus a place where you yourself can participate in communal
life (from the very beginning, Starbucks presented its coffee shops
as an ersatz community). And if this is not enough, if your ethical
needs are still unsatisfied and you continue to worry about the Third
World misery, then there are additional products you can buy. (First
as Tragedy 53–54)
Thus, the fetish for the consumer is the well intentioned benefits of
buying “green” that allows the consumer to ignore the actual con-
sumptive practices and the potential exploitation—both of employees
as well as the environmental impact—that goes along with the con-
sumer culture. One can feel good about oneself for promoting a more
equitable world through purchasing fair trade coffee at Starbucks,
knowing that Starbucks cares for the environment and the people
who work the land, without ever taking the more proactive stance of
actually combating exploitation where it does exist.
This process also serves as a way of replacing the “real” experience
with the fetish even if the individual is aware of the artificiality of the
fetish and the situation from which it arises. Žižek gives the example
of the death of a loved one. The fetish “is the lie which enables us
to sustain the unbearable truth” (In Defense 296), yet one “ratio-
nally fully accept[s] this death” (In Defense 296). Žižek posits that
“Fetishists are not dreamers lost in their own private worlds, they are
thoroughly ‘realists,’ able to accept the way things effectively are—
since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel
the full impact of reality” (In Defense 296). Thus, the fetishist sees
the “real” world as it is, yet creates the fetish in order to cope with
this reality; this does not mean that the individual is not aware of the
reality from which they are escaping nor that one is unaware of the
very fetish that one uses. For Žižek, the “resistance” to an exploit-
ative capitalist culture is a mask that allows the consumer to have the
impression of actively combating the domination of the system while
at the same time it merely perpetuates the status quo.
In the end, Matías’s deviation from national culture provides little
more than an escape valve for him that allows the status quo to con-
tinue. While Matías’s fetishization of North American culture does
not have any political overtones for him, it clearly provides a space
where Matías can criticize the position of Chile as marginalized while
maintaining the status quo through his symbolic “rebellious” con-
sumption. This fetish also allows Matías to rebel against his family
and at the end of the novel return to it. At the same time, in show-
ing a preference for North American culture and consumption as
his fetish, Matías separates himself from any political discourse,
allowing the dictatorship to run its own course. As José Leandro

Urbina states,
[The protagonists] feel the dictatorship as a type of inconvenience, as a

model of contrary conduct to their juvenile conduct, but they know at
the same time that it has permitted their class to redefine itself, recon-
struct its image which is threatened by the years of social conflict and
to recognize themselves as a part of the process in which they become
the agents of fundamental change. (89)
Matías’s rebellion, both from his literal as well as his symbolic family,
is a very controlled rebellion, which in the end is nothing but a form
of domination. His North American dream allows his Chilean reality
to continue unchanged.
In utilizing mass culture as a fetish that allows the continuation
of the status quo, Fuguet is continuing the conversation regarding
mass culture that starts with the Onda. In a postmodern context,
Fuguet describes the ways in which mass culture and the consumer’s
reaction to mass culture have changed. Fuguet is not expressing a
situation in which mass culture is just beginning to demonstrate
its importance, both as an instrument of control through the gov-
ernment nor as the means to resisting this governmental intrusion
into identity like the Onda authors do. While Fuguet especially uti-
lizes mass culture as a way of explaining his generational identity,
the resistance to Chilean identity that comes out in his narration is
more of a reaction than an active resistance. In a postmodern con-
text where the issues of cultural imperialism have largely been sup-
planted by the ideology of globalization and preoccupations with
the unheard voices are a part of postmodern ideology, what Fuguet
contributes to the conversation about mass culture is to argue that
in a world of destabilizing identities and structures of power, the
culture industry maintains its power over the consumers through
direct intervention or through the false, fetishistic perception of
being an active participant.
Notes
1. For more information on the context of Mexico in the 1960s and
issues of popular or mass culture see: Agustín, La contracultura en
México (The Counterculture in Mexico, 1996), Zolov, Refried Elvis
(1999), and Monsiváis, Amor perdido (Lost Love, 1977).
2. This and all quotes from Spanish language texts are my own transla-
tions, unless otherwise stated in the bibliography.
3. Martine Renouprez describes Agustín’s own insistence on becom-

ing a part of the literary elite while at the same time maintaining his
popular appeal. It is for this reason that Agustín insists on La tumba
being published in the Grandes Escritores de Nuestro Tiempo series
published by Novaro.
4. La tumba can be seen as a representation of trends that Agustín later
follows in his other works—like Inventando que sueño (Pretending
that I Dream, 1968) or Se está hacienda tarde (final en laguna)
(It’s Getting Late,1973)—and that other Onda authors, like
Gustavo Sainz or Parménides García Saldaña, exhibit. Mass culture
becomes tied to a rebellious youth counterculture, which ques-
tions the authority of the official discourse on national identity in
Mexico.
5. The idea of “drop-outismo” comes from the famous Timothy Leary
mantra: “Turn on, tune in, drop out” (see Agustín, La contracultura
en México 61–64, or Monsiváis, Amor perdido 228).
6. It is important to remember that what was mass culture in the United
States at this time—the 1960s and 1970s—and thus largely rejected
by the upper class, was seen in Mexico as a symbol of status, and
thus “belonged” more to the upper and middle classes because of the
limited availability. In other words, only those who had the economic
ability to acquire mass culture and understood English could effec-
tively consume North American mass culture.
7. While Sarlo confronts culture in general and mass culture specifi-
cally in her criticism of postmodern life, there are other effects that
carry equal weight for her, like the decline in the quality of edu-
cation. In her introduction, Sarlo states that, “The very poorest
can feed on a diet of ‘fast food’ television alone. Those who are a
little better off have an only slightly greater range of cultural good
from which to choose from, as they reflect back on the heyday of
public schools to which they cannot longer send their children or
from which their children no longer receive what their parents once
received. The rich have absolute freedom of choice, as much here as
anywhere else” (4).
8. The comparison between the Mexican Onda and the McOndo
generation is one that has received some critical attention by Kelly
Hargrave and Georgia Seminnet (16). For his part, Edmundo Paz
Soldán states that, “Fuguet’s work, which maintains a relationship
with authors like Manuel Puig in the exploration of pop landscape in
Latin America, breaks with another type of narrative that examines
this landscape, that of the Mexican Onda or of Skarmeta in his own
country; the utopian counterculture has given way to an acceptance—
at times uncomfortable—of the neoliberal moment” (“Escritura”
45). While these critics tie Fuguet to the Onda and to Puig, there is
to date little attempt to intentionally focus on the interplay between
the two groups of authors.
9. Ivonne Cuadra also talks about this distance. She states, “Matías dis-
covers that even though personal problems led him to know another
reality, another environment, it is important to maintain the order to
which he is accustomed. Reading the personal moves to the national
making a historical reference to the class that supported the perma-
nence of the dictatorship” (59).
10. Lynell Williams explains this overt recognition of consumption as
a part of Chile’s neoliberal economic policies. Williams argues that,
“[t]he privileged class that produced it is a product of neoliberalism—
excess instead of scarcity. Matías sees and feels the problems but is
impotent to change them” (16).
11. Even in the act of returning home, Matías parallels the story of
Caulfield. Catcher in the Rye ends with Caulfield explaining, “[t]hat’s
all I’m going to tell about. I could probably tell you what I did after
I went home, and how I got sick and all, and what school I’m supposed
to go to next fall, after I get out of here, but I don’t feel like it” (213).
While Salinger’s character refuses to explain what happened after
his rebellious trip, Fuguet dwells more on the aftermath of Matías’s
journey, producing a clearer rupture with his rebellious attitude and
a return to “normal” life.
12. María Nieves Alonso comments on the passive stance of Matías
through her analysis of the bildungsroman genre. She states that,
“[t]he result of this process [of knowledge] is, in the present, an
iminently passive heroe, since the knowledge acquired makes him
retreat—a valid action—and impedes him from continuing to
another place that is not one of protection and shelter” (12).
Bibliography
Agustín, José. La tumba. Mexico: Planeta Mexicana, 1964.
Agustín, José. La contracultura en México. Mexico: Grijalbo, 1996.
Agustín, José. “La onda que nunca existió.” Revista de crítica latinoameri-
cana. 30.59 (2004): 9–17.
Alonso, María Nieves. “Alberto Fuguet, un (in)digno descendiente de una
buena tradición.” Acta Literaria 29 (2004): 7–31.
Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “La Onda as Parody and Satire.” José Agustín: Onda
and Beyond. Ed. June C. D. Carter and Donald L. Schmidt. Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1986. 37–55.
Colás, Santiago. Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
Cuadra, Ivonne. “De Macondo a McOndo: La tecno-narrativa de Alberto
Fuguet.” South Eastern Latin Americanist 44.3 (2001): 54–65.
Fuguet, Alberto. Bad Vibes. Trans. Kristina Cordero. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1997.
Fuguet, Alberto and Sergio Gómez, eds. “Presentación del país McOndo.”
McOndo. Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996.
García Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures. Trans. Christopher Chiappari.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
García Canclini, Néstor. Consumers and Citizens. Trans. George Yúdice.
García Corrales, Guillermo. “Entrevista con Alberto Fuguet.” Revista inter-
americana de bibliografía 49.1–2 (1999): 283–292.
Hargrave, Kelly and Georgia Seminet.“De Macondo a ‘Mcondo’: Nuevas
voces en la literatura latinoamericana.” Chasqui 27.2 (1998): 14–26.
Johnson, Dianne. “Development Assistance, the Environment, and
Stakeholder Participation: Toward a New Conditionality?” Globalization
and Uncertainty in Latin America. Ed. Fernando López-Alvez and
Dianne Johnson. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 117–144.
Manjarrez, Héctor. Acto propiciatorio. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1970.
Manjarrez, Héctor. Lapsus (algunos actos fallidos). Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz,
1971.
Monsiváis, Carlos. Amor perdido. Mexico: Biblioteca Era, 1977.
Opazo, Cristián. “De armarios a bibliotecas: Masculinidad y tradición literaria
chilena en la narrativa de Alberto Fuguet.” Revista chilena de literatura 74
(2009): 79–98.
Pastén, Agustín. “Neither Grobalized nor Glocalized: Fuguet’s or Lembel’s
Metropolis?” AmeriQuests 2.1 (2005): 1–19.
Paz Soldán, Edmundo. “Escritura y cultural audiovisual en Por favor, rebobi-
nar de Alberto Fuguet.” Latin American Literary Review 30.59 (2002):
43–54.
Renouprez, Martine. “José Agustín y su ingreso en la institución literaria
mexicana.” Texto Crítico 2.3 (1996): 75–180.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Bantam, 1964.
Sarlo, Beatriz. Scenes from Postmodern Life. Trans. Jon Beasley-Murray.
Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2001.
Urbina, José Leandro. “Mala Onda de Alberto Fuguet.” Albricia: La novela
chilena del fin de siglo. Ed. Verónica Cortínez. Santiago: Cuarto Propio,
2000. 83–100.
Williams, Lynell. “La impotencia: La vida novelística de dos teorías
económicas.” El Cid (2005): 15–20.
Žižek, Slavoj. In Defence of Lost Causes. Brooklyn: Verso, 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, then as Farce. Brooklyn: Verso, 2009.
Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis. Berkeley: University California Press, 1999.
Chapter 2
Bolaño and the Canon
Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat
R oberto Bolaño’s biography and literary career can be summarized

in a few words: He was born in Santiago in 1953; left his native Chile
with his family in 1968; led a group of marginal poets in the Mexico
City in the mid-1970s; moved to the Catalan region of Spain later
that decade where he took up writing novels and stories; published
Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives) in 1998, for which he
won the Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos prizes in consecutive years;
and died in 2003 of a liver condition shortly after being consecrated
as the most important writer of his generation and a year before the
publication of his monumental work 2666 (2004). He was a writer
who labored in relative obscurity for over two decades before making
his mark in the literary world, writing poems and authoring some
hard to classify novels set in Barcelona, Girona, Paris, and Blanes but
featuring Latin American characters.1 Canonization in the Hispanic
world was followed by canonization in the English-speaking world,
where the Bolaño boom was, however, conditioned by the repackag-
ing of his figure for a US audience (see Pollack).2 Whereas Bolaño’s
stature abroad depended to some extent on a new set of cultural stereo-
types, in Latin America and Spain his standing among fellow writ-
ers and readers was grounded on his ability to recast the avant-garde
tradition and the legacy of the Boom in a fresh narrative language
that is simultaneously visionary and colloquial. This chapter focuses
on Bolaño’s relationship to the canon of Latin American fiction and
on the intersection between his work and that of José Donoso, his
Chilean Boom precursor.
Jorge Herralde, founder and director of Editorial Anagrama and
Bolaño’s editor since 1995—when the writer submitted Estrella dis-
tante (Distant Star, 1996) for publication to that prestigious pub-
lishing house at the editor’s request—has reconstructed Bolaño’s
40 R i c a r d o G u t i é rr e z- M o uat
editorial history, thereby illuminating the path that took the Chilean-
born author to literary stardom and eventually to canonical sta-
tus. The story begins with the manuscript of La literatura nazi en
América (Nazi Literature in the Americas, 1996), which Herralde
intended to publish but that Bolaño withdrew from consideration in
order to honor a previous commitment to Seix Barral, and continues
with a personal meeting between the author and the editor, the latter
already impressed by the literary promise of the former, which edi-
tors at other prestigious publishing houses like Alfaguara and Plaza &
Janés failed to recognize. The meeting marked the beginning of a
long-standing relationship between the author and the editor that
resulted in the publication of Bolaño’s subsequent books, including
Los detectives salvajes and the posthumous 2666. It was with the publi-
cation of the first of these in 1998, as Herralde states, that the Bolaño
boom exploded and inaugurated a third stage in the author’s editorial
life (41).3 After winning the Herralde and Gallegos prizes in 1998
and 1999 respectively, this novel was quickly compared to Cortázar’s
Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), a watershed novel for a previous gen-
eration of Latin American readers. According to Herralde, with Los
detectives salvajes Bolaño became a model and hero for a new genera-
tion of Latin American authors, displacing many of the figures of the
Boom from their formerly held central position. Ignacio Echevarría,
Bolaño’s most noted critic and a fictitious—and anonymous—character
in the novel, subscribes to this opinion when he states that for the first
time since the Boom, Bolaño created a new paradigm of the writer in
Latin America that made former types of authorial figures like Borges
and García Márquez obsolete (Maristain 198). And Jorge Volpi, who
called Bolaño the “last Latin American writer,” dates Bolaño’s canon-
ization among his generational peers from the time of his last public
appearance, which was at a literary congress held in Sevilla in June
2003 (Maristain 237).
However, Bolaño’s canonization is not just the product of a gen-
erational consensus, marketing strategies, or cultural politics. Many
critics have carried out close readings of Bolaño’s work and grounded
the author’s prominence on specific literary merits. For example,
Roberto González Echevarría directly addresses the canonical status
of Bolaño’s fiction in an essay on Nocturno de Chile (By Night in
Chile, 2000). The critic elaborates a subjective typology of canoni-
cal works— albeit one that he claims has general import—and shows
how Bolaño’s Nocturno fulfills each of the criteria. Canonical works
treat elevated themes, display an awareness of their fictional condi-
tion through metatextual commentary, contain an undecipherable
Bol año and the Canon 41
secret that may be at the origin itself of the text, recycle the literary
tradition—but without Bloomian anxiety—and possess a clear sense
of style (González Echevarría, 120–121). Bolaño’s Nocturno treats
important themes like death, religious faith, guilt, evil, and the liter-
ary calling; displays a constant awareness of its literary condition to
the extent that the narrator is a well-known critic; includes enigmatic
stories within the story that seem to be saying something about the
work as a whole; establishes a dialogue with universal and national lit-
erature (Dante, St. Augustine, Neruda, Parra, Lafourcade, Lihn); and
displays the kind of polished literary style that one would expect from
a sophisticated reader and connoisseur of literature and philosophy.
González Echevarría unambiguously affirms that Nocturno de Chile
has secured itself a place in the canon of Latin American literature,
and emphasizes the point by adding that Bolaño is a better novelist
than José Donoso, his Chilean forerunner.
Bolaño got more international exposure than Donoso ever did but
that should not be taken as a value judgment on their relative literary
worth.4 And, as I will argue later, there is more in common between
them than would appear at first sight. But before focusing on this
issue, let us go back to one of the points González Echevarría makes
about canonical works—their tendency to absorb and recycle tradi-
tion in original ways—and attempt to place Bolaño, the novelist and
short story writer, as an heir of the Boom. Bolaño was well aware of
the weight of tradition and actually defines great literature partially
in terms of its canonical legacy: “great literature is not a question
of style nor grammar . . . It is a question of illumination, as Rimbaud
understands the word. It is a question of clairvoyance. That is, on the
one hand, it is a lucid and exhaustive reading of the canonical tree
and, on the other, it is a time bomb. A testimony (or a work, how-
ever we want to call it) that explodes in the hands of the readers and
that projects itself towards the future” (“Dos hombres”). The recep-
tion of tradition is conditioned, in this statement, by the explosive
nature of the visionary work, the work resulting from a “lucid” read-
ing of the canon. Bolaño’s definition lends itself to a dichotomous
reading: on the one hand, a bow toward tradition and, on the other
hand, the call for an explosive break, which complicates the relation
between the past and the future, the canon and the avant-garde art
work, and whose synthetic resolution might well be the (under)min-
ing of the canon. In fact, what we have here is a double dichotomy
since Bolaño’s statement also implies an opposition between reading
and writing, one which is more explicit in another comment by the
author regarding his stance vis-à-vis the canon of Latin American
fiction. When asked in a 1999 interview, “What is your relationship

with writers from the Latin American Boom,” Bolaño responded:
“Good, very good—as a reader, of course” (Last Interview 43), which
leaves us wondering what his relation as a writer was to the likes of
Vargas Llosa and García Márquez, whom he characterizes in that same
passage as gigantic authors whose work is far superior to anything
produced by the members of his own generation.
As a writer, Bolaño had to actively deal with the great legacy of the
Boom, and while many critics would agree that he ended up writing
his own Rayuela, few could explain what negotiations were neces-
sary between what T. S. Eliot called the “historical sense” and the
demands of the present and the future.5 Jorge Volpi takes a step in
that direction when he scripts a playful version of Bloom’s anxiety
of influence to construct the relationship between Bolaño and his
Boom precursors. Referring to the authors of the Boom, the Mexican
author writes: “Bolaño read them as a youth, he read them as an adult
and perhaps would have re-read them as an older person: naming
them or without naming them, each of his books attempts to be an
answer, a departure, a breath of air, a reply, a refutation, an homage,
a challenge or an insult to all of them” (“Bolaño, epidemia” 78). And
he goes on to couch the relation between the successor and his pre-
cursors in terms of boxing and wrestling: “Each morning . . . Bolaño
dedicated a few hours to prepare himself for his daily fight with the
Boom authors. Sometimes he faced Cortazar, whom he managed to
beat once with a knock-out in the last round; other times he pounced
on the duo of technical fighters formed by Vargas Llosa and Fuentes;
and, when he felt particularly powerful or angry or nostalgic, he
allowed himself to face the world champion of the heavyweights, the
ripper of Aracataca, García Márquez, his nemesis, his mortal enemy
and, even though it surprises many . . . his only god, together with
Borges, this even bigger god” (78). Volpi concludes: “Every morning
he thought about how to ring the neck of one of them or how to
apply a wrestling lock on another of these old men who, painfully,
never paid attention to him or did so too late” (78).6
Harold Bloom spoils the festive metaphors used by Volpi by deem-
phasizing the personal or psychological components of the struggle
between successors and precursors. He points out that “influence
anxiety, in literature, need not be an affect in the writer who arrives
late in a tradition. It is always an anxiety achieved in a literary work,
whether or not its author ever felt it.” (Anatomy of Influence 6).7 And
he adds that what matters for interpretation is the textual evidence,
the revisionary relationship between works and especially, one would
suppose, the hidden evidence of a struggle between precursors and

latecomers that critics like Bloom himself can make evident by apply-
ing revisionary ratios to the reading of poems. If we view Bolaño’s
interaction with the canon of Latin American fiction as an inter-
textual dialogue, Borges’s traces can easily be found in La litera-
tura nazi en América or in “El gaucho insufrible” (The Insufferable
Gaucho) an obvious rewriting of the Argentine master’s most famous
story, “El Sur,” just as Cortázar’s imprint may be detected in the
Auxilio Lacouture of Amuleto (Amulet, 1999)—a reincarnation of
la Maga—and in the glíglico spoken by the character’s poet friends
when they want to leave her out of the conversation. We can also
discover the ironic reference in the title of Bolaño’s Una novelita
lumpen (A Little Lumpen Novel, 2002) to José Donoso’s Tres nov-
elitas burguesas (1973)—translated as Sacred Families in English—
and, going further, deduce responses to García Márquez and Vargas
Llosa, respectively, in the serial genealogy of María Expósitos—in
Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (Woes of the True Policeman,
2011)—and in the extravagant duel between the writer and the critic
in Chapter 22 of Los detectives salvajes, which seems to emulate the
Peruvian writer’s early story “El desafío.”
It seems doubtful that Bolaño wanted to be read as an avatar of
Borges or Cortázar, though he recorded his “permanent” debt to
both of them when he received the Rómulo Gallegos prize for Los
detectives salvajes in 1999 (see Between, 352–353). It is more likely
that he invoked the names of his Argentine precursors not only out
of sincere admiration for their work but also for reasons having to do
with the reformulation of the canon that Bolaño carried out in the
last few years of his life and that is well documented in Entre parén-
tesis (Between Parentheses, 2004), the collection of essays, reviews,
and occasional pieces that was originally published the year after the
author’s death. As the editor of that collection states, Bolaño projected
from early on his proper place in the literary map—or in the literary
field, as Bourdieu would have it—and he did it in a style picked up in
the combative days when he was an unknown and rebellious poet in
Mexico City—a style grounded on a regime of complicities and hos-
tilities that is no longer in vogue—that later on in life got him mixed
up in the sort of polemics that can damage a reputation (Maristain
184). Critics would agree, for example, that Bolaño’s relationship
with Borges is strategic in that it allowed the former to reform the
canon from a secure position. At any rate, Bolaño’s engagement with
the canon is always passionate but devoid of anxiety. John Barth’s
definition of the ideal postmodern writer as one who “neither merely
repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist

parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents” and
who has “the first half of our century under his belt, but not on
his back” (“Literature” 203) discards any notion of anxiety and fits
Bolaño well.
As we know, it was the publication of Los detectives salvajes that put
its author in the literary map. The novel is about the failed attempt
by a band of bohemian poets to break into the cultural field, and
about the search by their ringleaders for what is left of a once proud
avant-garde tradition, a tradition now in tatters and incarnated in the
unlikely figure of Cesárea Tinajero, the mother of Mexican visceral
realism, who meets her death in a confusing roadside incident at the
end. As a critic points out, not only literature but the literary institu-
tion play a major role in the novel. All the factors that underlie the
autonomy of the literary field seem to fall within the purview of the
various characters and narrative voices: “The function that institu-
tions and cultural agents assign to literature, the symbolic produc-
tions that said institutions and agents exclude from the intellectual
circuit, the relationship that is established between those who write
and the state apparatus, the reading public, the role that magazines
and newspapers play, the literary genres that are privileged, the execu-
tion of the publishing industry and the literary market, [and] the role
that critics play” (Pastén, 425). The same critic argues that Bolaño’s
novel devalues literature just as much as it glorifies it, which is another
way of saying that the novel was written by a reformed infrarrealista
in whose discourse the avant-garde, the revolutionary dream, and the
prospects of youth all blend together in a melancholy mix. Arturo
Belano—the author’s alter ego—gives up poetry, begins writing fic-
tion and then turns to journalistic prose, and in the end gets lost in
Africa, like his namesake Arthur Rimbaud, who chose the same fate
and gave up writing poetry at the age of twenty. Or, as Bolaño would
have it, The Savage Detectives is both an agony and a game, a reflec-
tion of a generational defeat as well as being the voice and joy of
a generation (Between 353).
It is noteworthy that the novel that consecrated its author should
be, to a large extent, about the failure to reach cultural status, but no
more noteworthy than the centrality of poetry in a work that can-
onized a novelist. What is important here is not to analyze the bal-
ance between poetry and fiction in Bolaño’s work nor to rehearse the
arguments about the decline of poetry in the literary marketplace but
to point out that Bolaño confronted the canon and, specifically the
novels of the Boom, as a poet back in the 1970s. He himself admits
that his readings of the Boom were from the perspective of a poet,
and that if his reading had been from a narrator’s perspective, he
would have learned more about the internal structure of novels (Last
Interview 44). Critics have often noted that Bolaño’s novels tend
to have a discontinuous structure and that even his short ones, like
Amuleto and Nocturno de Chile, can be broken down into a sequence
of relatively self-contained stories that do form part of a larger nar-
rative design but that could also stand alone and be included, for
instance, in a collection of short stories by their author. One example
among many others is the story of the Andalusian woman told in
Chapter 24 of Los detectives salvajes, which corresponds to the story
“Clara” in Llamadas telefónicas (Telephone Calls, 1997), Bolaño’s
first collection of short stories. These narrative pieces are moving parts
that are dynamically recontextualized throughout the author’s work,
often crossing generic boundaries. Thus “El gusano” is a poem in
La universidad desconocida (The Unknown University, 2007), a story
in Llamadas telefónicas, and a fleeting reference in Los sinsabores del
verdadero policía (225–226). This is because the “large narrative
design” in Bolaño’s writing is not necessarily the individual novel but
the author’s work as a whole. In Los sinsabores there is a philosophical
reflection that applies to Bolaño’s entire literary project: “the Whole
is impossible, [and] knowledge is the classification of fragments”
(196). The struggle to unify in a single vision the fragments of the
imagination has a Romantic lineage that survived modernist poetry
but came to be undone in postmodern theory and art. In Bolaño,
however, the transmigration of motifs, the mixing of genres, and the
poetic reading of fiction endow the author’s work with an identity
of its own. Not a finished identity but one always in search of itself,
a project always in motion like the search for Cesárea Tinajero and for
Archimboldi in 2666. No wonder then that Bolaño’s critics have con-
nected Los detectives salvajes with Cortázar’s Rayuela, a notoriously
discontinuous novel deeply in debt to symbolist and surrealist poetry
and one in which all manner of “genres” (or languages) are mixed in
the search for the center of the Mandala.
In a certain passage of Los detectives salvajes, set in 1977, the nar-
rating character records a conversation between herself and the night
watchman of a roadside campsite, who is none other than Arturo
Belano. They are talking about literature and the watchman says that
“a novelist from the country I’m from lives here in Sitges and I vis-
ited him once” (230). This novelist—who is obviously José Donoso—
“seemed depressed and a little bit sick” and asked Belano “whether
I had seen a film that was made in Mexico of one of his novels” (230).
Belano had seen it and liked it but had not read the book, which puts
him in an uncomfortable position regarding the novelist’s question.
“I haven’t read many novels,” says the watchman, “but I have read
lots of poetry” (230).8
Donoso, of course, is known as the premier Chilean novelist of the
twentieth century but Bolaño does not give him much credit for this,
arguing that it is not a great feat to be regarded as an important novel-
ist in Chile: “To say that he’s the best Chilean novelist of the century
is to insult him . . . To say that he’s among the century’s best writers in
Spanish is an exaggeration . . . In the grand theater of Lezama, Bioy,
Rulfo, Cortázar, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Sábato, Benet, Puig,
Arenas, Donoso’s work automatically pales and takes second place”
(Between 108–109). We may agree or disagree with this verdict but
there is no doubt that Bolaño’s relation to Donoso’s legacy is uncom-
fortable. At the beginning of the “Mystery” piece, Bolaño avows that
it is hard for him to write about Donoso and later on he adds that
Donoso’s legacy is “a dark room” where beasts fight. Bolaño only
gives Donoso credit for three books: El lugar sin límites (Hell Has
No Limits, 1965), Obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird
of Night, 1970), and El jardín de al lado (The Garden Next Door,
1981) but is far more severe with the “donositos,” the younger heirs
of Donoso in Chile whose reading of “their master” is deficient and
distorts his legacy. Bolaño radically sets himself apart from this crowd
of disciples and, in the process, aggrandizes the figure of Donoso,
who thus remains available for further reading and interpretation: “It
would be better if they read him. It would be better if they stopped
writing and started reading instead” (Between 109).
I indicated above that Bolaño’s Una novelita lumpen may be read
as an ironic reference to Donoso’s Tres novelitas burguesas, and yet
Bolaño does not rewrite Donoso’s tryptich as he rewrites Borges’s
“El Sur.” What Bolaño likes about Donoso is his taste for losers but
apparently he fails to connect with his forerunner on the imaginative
level. There is no Bloomian “misprision” involved in the relationship.
Yet there is a connection between Bolaño and Donoso that has not
been noticed and, strangely enough, it has to do with the relevance
of poetry in a literary universe ruled by fiction. It is well known that
the poet is the central myth in Bolaño’s universe, and if we are look-
ing for a characterization of the poet that will fit Bolaño’s discourse,
we will find it in Rimbaud’s “Lettre du Voyant” or in a brief text by
Bolaño himself, in which he writes: “No one in the world is as brave
as a poet. No one in the world faces disaster with more dignity and
understanding . . . They work in the void of the word, like astronauts
marooned on dead-end planets, in deserts where there are no read-

ers or publishers . . . In the guild of writers they’re the greatest and
least sought-after jewel. When some deluded kid decides at sixteen or
seventeen to be a poet, it’s a guaranteed family tragedy . . . But their
fragility is deceptive . . . Behind these shadowy fronts are probably the
toughest people in the world, and definitely the bravest” (Between
117–118).
Nowhere in his work does Donoso exalt the figure of the poet in
terms similar to these, but poets and poetic references do appear in
his fiction and he himself is the author of a work of poetry, Poemas de
un novelista (Poems from a Novelist), originally published in 1981.
Bolaño fails to refer to this work, or to notice that even in El jardín
de al lado—one of Donoso’s novels that he approves of—one of the
central characters is a sort of postmodern reincarnation of Rimbaud.
It is true that the figures of a poet and a novelist are not nearly as
well fused in Donoso as they are in Bolaño, whose fiction often turns
around the fortunes of poets. The title of Donoso’s poetic work is
quite clear in this regard. These are the poems of a novelist and not of
a poet, and should not be judged as the poems of an actual poet, which
Bolaño was throughout his life, including his life as a novelist. More
importantly, Bolaño’s prose is visionary in a way closer to poetry than
to prose fiction. Nevertheless, Donoso’s incursions in the territory
of poetry suggests a complicity between both authors that has so far
remain unnoticed. The reference above to the “Donoso” character in
Los detectives salvajes is almost ironic. The dialogue between the night
watchman and the novelist takes place in Sitges in 1977. Poemas de un
novelista includes a section entitled “Retratos (Sitges, 1977),” which
leads us to speculate that while the watchman and the novelist were
talking about El lugar sin límites in Los detectives salvajes, Donoso was
actually writing poems in the same place and at the same time.
Sitges is also the location where the protagonists of El jardín de
al lado are trapped along with various other Latin American political
exiles from the Southern Cone and the hordes of tourists who descend
on the Spanish Costa Brava each summer. Julio Méndez and his wife
Gloria have an opportunity to get away from the “hell of Sitges” when
a wealthy friend offers them his apartment in Madrid for the summer
so that Julio may continue working on his novel and Gloria dedicate
her time to her translations and occasional articles. El jardín de al
lado is the story of a failed writer and of the anxious rewriting of a
failed novel, which is obviously not the case of El jardín de al lado
itself but of the aborted avatars it contains in a scheme of mise-en-abyme
reflections. At the end of the novel, the couple moves back to Sitges
and Gloria is revealed to be the actual author of Donoso’s novel while

Julio, the putative author, morphs into a modest literature professor
at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
The uncanny parallel between Sitges and Blanes—Bolaño’s loca-
tion on the Costa Brava—is not the only link connecting Bolaño and
Donoso in El jardín de al lado. The theme of exile or expatriation is
another such link but there is also a more radical connection between
both authors having to do with the very ground of literature.9 If
for Bolaño the poet is the central literary myth of modernity—and
Rimbaud its most perfect incarnation—for the narrator of Donoso’s
novel, “a writer is endowed with a superior aura” (116). The mythi-
cal authorial figure in El jardín de al lado is Marcelo Chiriboga,
“the most insultingly famous member of the dubious Boom” (117)
and a sort of metonymy of García Márquez. Chiriboga’s mystique
includes mastering the secrets of literary creation but also being “on
close terms with the Pope, Brigitte Bardot, Fidel Castro, Caroline of
Monaco, [and] García Márquez” (117–118). In the novel’s central
scene, set in an antiques shop where mirrors proliferate and dazzle
the casual onlooker, this tropical media star appears surrounded
by rare silver objects possessing that unique aura that, according
to Walter Benjamin, has been corroded by mechanical reproduc-
tion. The halo of cultural refinement and priceless value bathes in
its splendor not only the narrator’s literary idol but also Bijou, the
character who in the novel embodies the figure of Rimbaud: “I’m
aware of Bijou’s odor of sweat at my side, his corrupt Rimbaudian
presence: bad teeth, fingernails bitten down . . . In the mirror of the
shop window I see his halo of blond hair superimposed on the costly
silver objects inside, and next to it our own poor, ragged, vulgar
reflections . . . All of a sudden my eyes zoom past Rimbaud’s reflec-
tion . . . in the window, to rest my gaze on someone I recognize at the
back of the shop” (116–117).
I am not suggesting that the aura of the poet in Bolaño’s dis-
course is comparable to the aura of the “writer” in Donoso’s novel.
For one thing, the writer is specifically a novelist and not a poet in
Donoso; for another, Bolaño denies his poet the luminosity tradi-
tionally associated with aura when he refers to the “shadowy fronts”
of poets behind which hide the toughest and bravest personalities.
More importantly, Chiriboga’s aura—in the original sense of a pure
image—is to some extent degraded by its transformation into the
false aura of celebrities in an age of media supremacy, while Bijou’s
halo—despite being superimposed on costly silver objects—recalls
Baudelaire’s “Perte d’auréole,” in which the angel-poet drops his halo
in the mire of the macadam and can walk about the city and “commit
foul acts” without being singled out.
Yet the invocation of Rimbaud in El jardín de al lado should not
go unnoticed. Bijou, who in the novel is both a corrupt Rimbaldian
figure and an angelo musicante, is Julio Méndez’s desired alter ego,
and a presence as troubling to him as Tadzio is to Aschenbach in
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912). Bijou, in fact, is a combina-
tion of Rimbaud and Mann’s (and Visconti’s) golden youth. But which
Rimbaud? Not the visionary rebel who in the “Lettre du Voyant”
writes that the poet must make himself a seer by a derangement of
the senses and by experiencing all forms of love, suffering, and mad-
ness so that he might reach the unknown—this would be Bolaño’s
Rimbaud—but the one who in the same letter writes: “Je est un
autre.” Donoso’s dramatized and failed author is constantly looking
to exchange identities with another as a means of liberating himself
from the moral restrictions imposed by his bourgeois background and
redeeming himself from his literary failure. His moral decadence—he
steals a painting and passes it as his own—is reflected in Bijou’s moral
“corruption”—a reflection that makes identity possible—but Bijou
also holds the key to an aesthetic sublimation that would neutralize
the ethical imperatives repressing Julio’s artistic creativity.10
The Rimbaud figure recurs in La desesperanza (Curfew), Donoso’s
1986 novel that is squarely set in dictatorial Chile. The novel is to a
large extent a homage to Pablo Neruda—whom Donoso read com-
pulsively in his youth—if not part itself of Neruda’s legacy in Chilean
literature.11 The story takes place over the twenty-four hours that
pass between the wake of Matilde Urrutia—the poet’s third and final
wife—and her funeral in Santiago’s General Cemetery. The first part
(“Evening”) takes place in the widow’s house where a motley cast of
characters congregate to say their last goodbye. Among them are the
two main protagonists of the novel: Judit Torre, a beautiful bour-
geois intellectual who militates in the resistance against Pinochet,
and Mañungo Vera, an internationally famous folk singer—probably
modeled after Víctor Jara—who returns to Chile after thirteen years
abroad to confront national reality. A third protagonist is Lopito,
a failed poète maudit who recites Rimbaud and whose past includes
a stint with the MIR, the radical Left-wing group that was ruth-
lessly persecuted after the fall of Allende. This is the trio of characters
around whom the story is built and whose interaction is developed
in the two other parts of the novel: “Night” and “Morning.” Lopito
is a former lover of Judit and a former close friend of Mañungo’s.
Both Mañungo and Judit lead inauthentic lives that are redeemed
by Lopito’s sacrifice at the end of the novel. Mañungo, because he

represents a cause in which he scarcely believes but that redounds in
his celebrity status abroad; Judit, because she never confesses to her
former cellmates that she was not raped in prison on account of her
social standing and refined looks. Lopito’s death at the hands of the
police brings both identity crises to a resolution. Mañungo chooses
to stay in Chile and makes a definitive political commitment whereas
Judit reaffirms her revolutionary identity.
As in El jardín de al lado, Donoso’s Rimbaldian figure in La
desesperanza is not endowed with any sort of visionary powers. His
role, once again, is to serve as a symbolic counterpoint to some other
protagonist of the novel—or imaginary counterpoint, to be more
precise, since the projective relationships between Bijou and Julio in
El jardín de al lado and between Lopito and Mañungo in La deses-
peranza take place in the order of the (Lacanian) imaginary and cor-
rects the prescriptions of the symbolic.12 Lopito is Mañungo’s “low
Other,” a figure that Stallybrass and White inscribe in a recurrent
social dialectic between high discourses—those of literature, philos-
ophy, statecraft, and the languages of Church and University—and
their low counterparts—the discourses of the peasantry, the urban
poor, the colonized, the marginal, the lumpen. “A recurrent pattern
emerges: the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for
reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in
some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other, but also that
the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized con-
stituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflicting
fusion of power, fear, and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a
psychological dependence upon precisely those Others who are being
rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level” (5–6).13
Lopito is the very incarnation of the abject and repulsive. References
to his green teeth, ugliness, grime, and drunkenness proliferate
through the novel. Not surprisingly, he is given to fits of reading
Le Bateau ivre (Drunken Boat) aloud at the strangest times. More
pathetically, his six-year-old daughter Lopita is described in somewhat
similar terms: “Lopita was a little monster with leaden feet, an insis-
tent, troublesome little girl, who opened herself to general mockery
because she was ugly, clumsy, and ridiculous” (274). Lopito provokes a
policeman at the end in defense of his little girl, and his ensuing death
provides symbolic closure to the lives of the other main characters.
Mañungo, in particular, “incorporates” the features of his low Other
in shaping his newfound sense of identity, and reconciles himself with
his modest provincial origins in the remote island of Chiloé, whose
folklore is an integral part of Donoso’s textual repertoire. Lopito is a

failed Rimbaud to the same extent that Julio Méndez, in El jardín de
al lado, is a failed García Márquez or, indeed, a failed José Donoso.
Bolaño starts his brief piece on Donoso recording his incredulity
and disapproval of something he heard regarding Donoso’s death,
namely, that the dying novelist asked to have Huidobro’s Altazor
read to him in his last moments. Bolaño’s objection to Donoso’s last
wish—if that was indeed the case—is what it says about the writing life
and the national essence: “I don’t have anything against Huidobro,
I like Huidobro, but how can a dying man ask to be read that poem?
I don’t understand it . . . as if Donoso were a mirror in which the
essence of Chile and the essence of the writing life were reflected,
and that double image, throbbing with sickness, superficiality, and
indulgence, just makes me sad” (Between 107). Actually, Bolaño did
not like Huidobro—or his poem Altazor—that much, as we may
infer from comments he made in an interview with Mónica Maristain:
“Huidobro bores me a little. Too much trilling and tra-la-la-ing, too
much of the parachutist who sings Tyrolese songs as he falls. Better
the parachutist who plummets in flames, or the parachutist whose
parachute simply never opens” (Between 358). Huidobro, a canoni-
cal avant-garde poet, is one of the victims of Bolaño’s reformulation
of the canon, since Bolaño would relegate him to a secondary place
in favor of César Vallejo, the Mexican estridentistas and, ironically,
Juan Emar, a fairly neglected Chilean avant-garde writer, painter, and
art critic whose real name was Álvaro Yáñez and who was related
to José Donoso through the maternal branch of the latter’s family.
“Juan Emar” was also a friend of Huidobro’s and possibly the model
for the forgotten avant-garde painter Larco in Donoso’s Naturaleza
muerta con cachimba (Still Life with Pipe, 1990). In this nouvelle the
alcoholic Larco has withdrawn from the world in order to reject those
who rejected him and passes himself as the curator of a rundown
museum that houses the complete collection of Larco paintings.14
He dies chanting “Art isn’t worth a fart” but before dying performs
one last transgressive act—involving one of his own paintings—on
behalf of a newfound admirer. Though not a poet, Larco is the closest
approximation in Donoso’s fiction to the visionary poète maudit who
holds such a central place in Bolaño’s literary system.
Notes
1. These novels range from Monsieur Pain—written in 1981 but pub-
lished with the title La senda de los elefantes in 1993—to La pista de
hielo (The Skating Rink, 1993), and include Consejos de un discípulo
de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (Advice from One of Morrison’s

Disciples to a Joyce Fanatic, 1984) and El Tercer Reich (The Third
Reich, published posthumously in 2010 but written in 1989).
Antwerp, a “novel” published in 2002 but dating from 1980, was
originally a poetic sequence eventually collected in La universidad
desconocida (2007).
2. The success of the marketing strategy—which included making
Bolaño into a Kerouac/Che Guevara hybrid, and into a doomed
writer struggling with ill health, poverty, exile, and even drug
addiction in order to create literature—extends to the genre of the
Hollywood blockbuster, as evidenced by the recent movie Now You
See Me (2013), where the character played by Woody Harrelson is
shown reading Los detectives salvajes after his arrest.
3. The first two stages were the almost “clandestine” early publica-
tions of stories, poems, and novels in Spain, and the relative suc-
cess of Estrella distante and Llamadas telefónicas, the first two titles
published by Anagrama. Bolaño’s editorial life continued after the
author’s death, as implied above. The posthumous publication of
other novels such as El Tercer Reich and Los sinsabores del verdadero
policía—both published by Anagrama after difficult negotiations
with the representatives of Bolaño’s widow—presumably constitutes
a new stage in the author’s editorial history, perhaps to be completed
by the hypothetical future publication of Bolaño’s correspondence.
4. Unlike Bolaño, Donoso never had one of his novels included in any of
The New York Times’s Best Books lists, but at the height of postmod-
ernism John Barth chose to exemplify the international postmodern
style by referring to Casa de campo (A House in the Country, 1978) in
one of his essays. See “Postmodernism Revisited,” 123–124.
5. The most individual parts of a poet’s work, wrote Eliot, “may be
those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality
most vigorously,” and he added that tradition involved a historical
sense and, therefore, “the perception, not only of the pastness of the
past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write
not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling
that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within
it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous
existence and composes a simultaneous order” (100).
6. Fuentes excludes Bolaño from his last pronouncement on the Latin
American novel (La gran novela latinoamericana) but Vargas Llosa
has nothing but praise for Los detectives salvajes and especially for its
first 100 pages.
7. Cecilia Manzoni reads a certain passage of Amuleto as a parody of
Bloom’s western canon in an article discussing the disarticulation and
re-articulation of the canon in Bolaño’s work (“Ficción de futuro”).
There may not be Bloomian agon in Bolaño but there certainly was a
competitive streak that goes back to the author’s early years in Spain
when he depended on the earnings from literary contests to make

ends meet and that comes out in the various pieces collected in Entre
paréntesis.
8. The book in question is El lugar sin límites. Arturo Ripstein’s film
version was released in 1977.
9. The question of the canon is also a powerful connection. If Bolaño
had read the Boom authors without anxiety, Donoso confronts them
in this novel—and to some extent in his personal history of the
Boom—with nothing but anxiety.
10. In the “Lettre du Voyant,” Rimbaud writes that the poet “becomes
among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one
accursed.”
11. Bolaño’s fixation with Neruda is compellingly recorded in “Carnet
de baile” one of the texts included in Putas asesinas. Neruda’s work—
in a poetic and material sense—is part of Bolaño’s family legacy.
12. Notice the almost anagrammatical relationship between the charac-
ters’s names in El jardín de al lado, which brings to mind Rimbaud’s
“Voyelles.”
13. El Quemado, in Bolaño’s El Tercer Reich, comes close to being a “low
Other” character along the lines of Lopito.
14. The museum is in Cartagena, Chile, a popular beach resort near
Santiago where Huidobro died in 1948.
Bibliography
Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment.” The Friday Book. New
York: Putnam, 1984. 193–206.
Barth, John. “Postmodernism Revisited.” Further Fridays. Boston: Little,
Brown, and Company, 1995.
Bloom, Harold. The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Bolaño, Roberto. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998–
2003. Ed. Ignacio Echeverría. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: New
Directions, 2011.
Bolaño, Roberto. “Dos hombres en el castillo: una conversación electrónica
sobre Philip K. Dick.” Letras libres 9. June 2002. Web. October 22, 2013.
<http://www.letraslibres.com/revista/convivio/dos-hombres-en-el
-castillouna-conversacion-electronica-sobre-philip-k-dick>
Bolaño, Roberto. The Savage Detectives. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Bolaño, Roberto. Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations.
New York: Melville, 2009.
Bolaño, Roberto. Woes of the True Policeman. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Donoso, José. Curfew. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. New York: Weidenfeld,
1988.
Donoso, José. The Garden Next Door. Trans. Hardie St. Martin. New York:
Grove Press, 1992.
Donoso, José. Poemas de un novelista. Madrid: Bartleby, 2009.
Donoso, José. Taratuta and Still Life with Pipe. Trans. Gregory Rabassa.
New York: Norton, 1993.
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Waste Land and Other
Writings. New York.: Random House, 2002. 99–116.
Gonzalez Echevarría, Roberto. “Nocturno de Chile y el canon.” Acta
Literaria 41 (2010): 117–128.
Herralde, Jorge. Para Roberto Bolaño. Santiago: Catalonia, 2005.
Maristain, Mónica. El hijo de Míster Playa: una semblanza de Roberto Bolaño.
México: Almadía, 2012.
Pastén, J. Agustín. “De la institucionalización a la disolución de la litera-
tura en Los detectives salvajes, de Roberto Bolaño.” Revista Canadiense de
Estudios Hispánicos 33.2 (2009): 423–446.
Pollack, Sarah. “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The
Savage Detectives in the United States.” Comparative Literature 61.3
(2009): 346–365.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
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(2008): 77–94. Web. October 22, 2013.
Chapter 3
The Crack and Contemporary

Latin American Narrative:
An Introductory Study
Tomás Regalado López
D uring the 1990s, the Spanish American novel was receiving uni-
versal acclaim, a situation partly fueled by the competition among
Spanish publishing houses, numerous translations into other lan-
guages, and a fast-paced book distribution system, prompted by new
communication technologies. Boom writers, Gabriel García Márquez,
Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, remained active until they
were in their eighties, producing their literary works for over five
decades and extending their literary careers—which included Nobel
prizes for García Márquez and Vargas Llosa—until the twenty-first
century. In addition, authors who started writing in the 1970s such
as Isabel Allende, Ángeles Mastretta, and Antonio Skármeta were
becoming popular with the reading public, and young writers born in
the 1970s in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina, for example, found
it easy to reach an international market previously reserved for con-
secrated authors. For literary critics, however, there were still many
unresolved issues regarding the contemporary Latin American lit-
erary field. One of the main problems was the question of which
name to use to describe this new literary period. While today one
can study the Boom from the point of view of their shared aesthetics
and narrative styles, since the 1970s critics have employed a series of
neologisms—Post-Boom, boomerang, babyboom, postmodernism—
in their attempt to define the characteristics of Latin American litera-
ture at the turn of the century. Within this critical context, plagued
with terminology problems, the “Crack” group made its appearance.
A group of Mexican writers born between 1961 and 1968, which
included Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Alejandro Estivill, Vicente
56 Tomás Regal a do López
Herrasti, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, and Jorge
Volpi, came together with the publication of a manifesto in 1996.
In a country like Mexico, where there is a tradition of literary groups
making significant contributions to the nation’s twentieth-century lit-
erary history—as is the case of “Ateneo de la Juventud” (Atheneum
of Youth), the “Contemporáneos” group, and the writers from the
“Generación de Medio Siglo” (Mid-Century Generation)—the Crack
movement has been regarded with suspicion, usually accused of hav-
ing exceptional marketing skills. Critical, academic, and journalistic
debates have not stopped the term from solidifying its presence as a
point of reference in the study of recent Latin American narrative.
Established Mexican writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Sergio Pitol, and
Elena Poniatowska have rejoiced in the emergence of this group on the
national literary scene. There are university courses in Chile, Spain, and
the United States devoted to studying the phenomenon. Their mani-
festo has been translated into English, French, and German and reviews
of these writers’ works that are enthusiastically positive as well as openly
negative have been published in world-renowned newspapers such as
The New York Times, Le Monde, and El País. In the meantime, the
careers of the seven members of the group have grown and they have
published over seventy novels and thirty texts in other genres, including
short stories, poetry, different kind of essays—literary, historical, bio-
graphical, and political. The corpus of texts is so enormous that it is no
longer possible to classify them as a unified aesthetic project. Among
the aspects the seven writers share are age group, nationality, and a con-
cept of literary friendship connected to the idea of critical thought. It
is even unclear how many writers belong to the group: Padilla, Urroz,
and Volpi have been present from the beginning and have participated
in all the group’s projects. Chávez Castañeda, Herrasti, and Palou did
not initially take part in the group experience and Estivill, who signed
one of the first group texts, Variaciones sobre un tema de Faulkner
(Variations on One of Faulkner’s Topics) in 1989, stopped writing until
2002. There are still many unanswered questions about the movement:
What is “the Crack”? Is it a group or a style? Is there any value to their
attempt at renewing Latin American literature in the 1990s? What is
the group’s connection to the subcontinent’s literary tradition?
With the intention of studying the Crack in the context of the
Latin American literary narrative at the beginning of the twenty-first
century my chapter aims to
present an account of the first encounters among the members from

the late 1980s until the creation of their key term two decades later;
T h e C r a c k a n d L at i n A m e r i c a n N a rr at i v e 57
determine whether the Crack is a group, a generation, or a style

and frame their ideas within the Latin American tradition, linking it
to the formal preoccupation of the Boom writers and the challenges to
writers employing magical realism, which became extremely popular
in the 1970s and 1980s;
show the connections between the novels written by the group
members and the ideas present in their 1996 “Crack Manifesto” as
well as in the 2004 volume Crack. Instrucciones de uso (The Crack.
User’s Manual), which are the two founding texts of the movement;
contextualize the Crack within the so-called Sixties Generation,
a group of Latin American writers born in the decade in which the
Boom flourished and gained recognition, and who began to publish
in their respective countries in the 1990s, attracting the attention of
Spanish publishing houses and who, two decades later, have achieved
success and have been translated into other languages;
underscore the importance of establishing a dialogue with Mexican,
Latin American, and international critics as an essential part of the
group’s identity and a key to their future survival; and
analyze the group’s theoretical discourse and, briefly, its most rep-
resentative novels, with the intention of associating the group with
a concept of a constantly changing and—at the same time—cyclical
tradition, and critical rigor.
The Crack group’s origins can be traced back to Centro Universitario

México (CUM), a private high school that counts among their
alumni important literary figures such as Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio
Pacheco, and Jorge Ibargüengoitia and where Ignacio Padilla, Eloy
Urroz, and Jorge Volpi met in the mid-1980s. As adolescents, the
three of them became friends as they were all interested in an annual
short-story competition organized by their school, which Padilla won
in 1985 with “El héroe del silencio” (Silence’s Hero), a story about
the Mexican Revolution’s ghosts, which he would later include in
his collection, Subterráneos (Underground Trains, 1990). After 1987,
they began to develop the critical spirit that would characterize the
Crack, as the three authors started to share ideological, philosophi-
cal, and literary influences. From this time, they showed a rigor-
ous cosmopolitan attitude that, like the Contemporáneos, became
a trait of the movement from the very beginning. There are two
texts that predate the 1996 manifesto: Variaciones sobre un tema de
Faulkner, mentioned above, and a novel written under the pseud-
onym “Compañía Antirruralista” (Anti-Rural Company) and written
by Estivill, Padilla, Urroz, and Volpi, whose main objective was to
present a parody of a few of Mexican literature’s common places. An
urban narrator, Hugo, employs a perfect, classical prose to parody
the style of Rulfo’s magical realism and historical events such as the
Mexican Revolution and the Cristero rebellion.1 The second liter-
ary project, entitled Tres bosquejos del mal (Three Sketches of Evil,
1994), consisted of three short stories with “evil” as their main topic
and the same commitment to technical experimentation. One can
see in these texts the wide variety of authors influencing the Crack
group. Urroz’s “Las plegarias del cuerpo” (Body’s Pleas) is an inter-
esting literary exercise questioning the usefulness of the time factor
as an organizational pattern for contemporary narratives. Padilla’s
“Imposibilidad de los cuervos” (Impossible Crows) employs Lewis’s
or Kafka’s Gothic aesthetics, and, finally, Volpi’s Días de ira (Day of
Anger) was an almost explicit homage to Bataille’s Erotism (1957)
and to Salvador Elizondo’s novel Farabeuf (1965).2 Pedro Angel
Palou and Alejandro Estivill introduced the collection to the media
and the public. Among those presents that day at the Arnaldo Orfila
auditorium were, perhaps for the first and only time to date, the seven
members of the group. Highlighting its valuable contribution as a
group project, Mexican critic Noé Cárdenas called Tres bosquejos del
mal the most important generational proposal to date (24).
On August 7, 1996, the Crack group was born. That afternoon, in
Mexico City’s San Angel Cultural Center, the following novels were
introduced: Chávez Castañeda’s La conspiración idiota (The Stupid
Conspiracy), Padilla’s Si volviesen sus majestades (If Their Majesties
Returned), Palou’s Memoria de los días (Record of the Days),
Urroz ’s Las Rémoras (The Obstacles), and Volpi’s El temperamento
melancólico (Melancholic Temperament). Except for Padilla, who was
in Salamanca taking courses for his PhD, all the authors were pres-
ent. Along with them were critic Héctor Pérez, and Sandro Coher,
editor for Grupo Patria, the publishing house that printed Padilla’s,
Volpi’s, and Urroz’s novels in its Nueva Imagen series.3 The launch
included a reading of the Crack Manifesto that would be published a
year later in the Mexican review Descritura, with only 1,000 issues.4
The manifesto was composed of five autonomous texts written by the
group members and it can be described as an analysis of the themes
their novels shared: similar apocalyptic topics and a desire for for-
mal experimentation, which, for the young authors, was connected
to John Brushwood’s concept of “deep novel” or “deeply searching
novel” (novela profunda) as developed in the critic’s study, Mexico
in its Novel.5 A deep novel for the Crack group was a work of fic-
tion characterized by attention to style, technical experimentation,
self-centered narrative, awareness of the genre’s traditional structure,
and—in an allusion to the Boom tradition—the request for active
participation of the readers in deciphering the text. In wide strokes,

the Crack group wanted to return to a Spanish American tradition of
the escritura novel, a term coined by Margo Glantz in 1971. Glantz
used it to describe autonomous literary texts that question reality
instead of portraying it.6 In contrast to the critically accepted notion
of the avant-garde literature as a break with tradition, the Crack mani-
festo clearly states that the group is rooted in traditions originating in
Mexican literature (Rulfo, Pitol, Del Paso, Fuentes), Latin American
literature (Cortázar, Donoso, Onetti, Vargas Llosa), and Western lit-
erature (Rabelais, Flaubert, Cervantes, Stern, or Joyce).
Even though it is not directly expressed in the text, one can notice
a partial departure from the characteristics that Shaw (267–276) or
Gutiérrez Mouat (3–10) have associated with Post-Boom narrative,
especially “light literature,” and writers considered magical realist
epigones. The so-called light literature (Chávez et al., “Manifiesto”
35) was a version of the Latin American novel that sought to continue
with the commercial success of the Boom literature by creating eas-
ily accessible texts, giving primacy to content over form. However,
light literature writers were not interested in technical innovations and
sought to distance themselves from the Boom politics and aesthet-
ics that dominated Latin American literature during the 1970s and
1980s. Some of the commercially successful light literature novels are
Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (The House of Spirits, 1982), Luis
Sepúlveda ’s Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (The Old Man Who
Read Love Stories, 1989), and Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para choc-
olate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1989). In 1981, Antonio Skármeta,
one of the most prominent writers of the Post-Boom, defined his
generation as “unpretentious, pragmatically anti-cultural, sensitive to
banality, and instead of seeking to understand reality, is simply trying
to present a copy of it” (81). In 1996, the Crack group was attempt-
ing to do the complete opposite of that: its members were creating
a daring literature—employing as models master pieces of world
literature—with a desire to challenge ordinary reading experience.
Because the Boom was born out of a reaction to outdated styles of
writing, the Crack group originated, in their members’ own words,
as a “simple reaction against exhaustion”: in their view, the great mid-
twentieth century Latin American literature and the magical realist
style, “had become, for our letters, a tragic caricature of their former
selves” (Chávez et al., “Manifiesto” 38). The movement’s name is an
allusion to a break with the Post-Boom tradition that preceded them.
A sort of journey in reverse had taken place, a regression from Rayuela
(Hopscotch), La casa verde (The Green House), or Cien años de soledad
(One Hundred Years of Solitude) to the narrative texts that Allende,

Esquivel, Sepulveda, and Skarmeta were writing—with only a few,
very rare, exceptions such as Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975), Fernando
del Paso’s Palinuro de México (Palinuro of México, 1977), Vargas
Llosa’s La guerra del fin del mundo (War at the End of the World,
1981), or García Ponce’s Crónica de la intervención (Chronicle of the
Intervention, 1982) following a different path. In 1996, the same year
as the Crack Manifesto, another theoretical text central to the study
of contemporary Latin American narrative appeared. The “Preface” to
the collection of short stories McOndo in which two Chilean novelists,
Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, were also calling for moving away
from magical realist aesthetics, while using an ironic tone to prob-
lematize Latin American writers’ identity in the face of globalization.7
Although produced without knowledge of the Crack manifesto—
five years later, Fuguet acknowledged that “we did not even glimpse
the astonishing achievements of the so-called Mexican Crack clan”
(“Magical” 70)—both texts are now considered the tip of the iceberg
of a generational discourse that encompasses writers born in the 1960s
all over Latin America. A discourse already present in earlier texts such
as Chávez Castañeda’s “La generación fría” (The Cold Generation,
1992) and Fuguet and Gómez’s 1993 anthology, Cuentos con walk-
man (Short Stories with Walkman, 1993). As Eduardo Becerra has
pointed out, this discourse had begun to invade young writers’ topics
and even influenced the Colombian “Generación mutante” (Mutant
Generation), which included Santiago Gamboa, Jorge Franco, Mario
Mendoza, and Héctor Abad Facolince (165–181). The same genera-
tional discourse soon became an influence for other anthologies such
as Las horas y las hordas (The Hours and the Hordes, 1997), Líneas
aéreas (Airlines, 1999), or Se habla español (Spanish Spoken, 2000),
seeking a Latin American readership, as well as for anthologies ori-
ented toward the Mexican literary market. The influence of the Crack
group was especially felt in the edition of many anthologies on Mexico
such as Dispersión multitudinaria (Mass Dispersal, 1997), Una ciu-
dad mejor que ésta (A Better City than the One We Live In, 1999),
Día de muertos (Day of the Dead, 2001), and Otro ladrillo en la pared
(Another Brick in the Wall, 2004). Although they were written with-
out knowledge of what was happening in other places in the subconti-
nent, the Crack manifesto as well as all the other generational theories
must be read as a meaningful act of protest against a stagnant cul-
tural and literary situation, a rejection of a mainly narrative phenom-
enon Chilean sociologist José Joaquín Brunner felicitously termed the
“macondization” of Latin American culture.8
In 1996 the Crack group considered that their five novels embod-
ied more or less the theoretical ideas of the movement. Chávez’s La
conspiración idiota, not published until 2003, is a claustrophobic
text, inspired in the readings of Juan Carlos Onetti, about the frag-
mentation of memory, the cruelty of childhood, and autonomous
consciousness. Padilla’s Si volviesen sus majestades, one of the most
original novels published in Mexico during the 1990s, employed a
new linguistic Koiné, a mix of Golden Age Spanish, computer slang,
Hollywood conventions, and Mexican idiomatic expressions as a sym-
bol of the Latin American writer’s confusion in the face of twenty-first
century globalization. Palou’s Memoria de los días narrates the apoca-
lyptic journey of the members of a Christian cult on their way to Los
Angeles. The religious group, which fails because of the avarice of its
faithful followers, is a microcosm of society. A story about the moral
corruption of contemporary life, which only writing—symbolized by
the narrator as the sect’s only survivor—can rescue. Described by
critics as “an encyclopedia of failed loves” (Page Polo), Urroz’s Las
Rémoras inherited the dual structure of Vargas Llosa’s La Tía Julia y
el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) in a narration that ques-
tions the possibility of finding the real meaning of existence in love
or sex. Volpi’s fourth novel, El temperamento melancólico, combines
artistic, narrative, and film discourses in a novel deeply aware in its
structure, of the history of melancholy, and the uselessness of art as
an antidote against contemporary ennui. In general, these five novels
showed in their structures a desire to fuse several genres and, as such,
they resemble the idea of a “totalizing novel,” which is at the same
time a difficult text—an idea that they borrowed from the Boom writ-
ers and developed in detail in their manifesto. Even though all group
members remained in touch with each other, their personal journeys
between 1996 and 2000 were determined by their graduate stud-
ies, which they pursued outside of Mexico—only Palou stayed in his
hometown, Puebla—in a sort of “voluntary exile,” which resembles,
in a way, the lives of the Boom writers three decades earlier.9 In 1997,
Nueva Imagen published novels by Chávez, Palou, Urroz, and Volpi
as well as two “mirror-stories” by Volpi and Urroz. This was the last
collective publication of the Crack group in the twentieth century.
A third stage for the group began in 1999 with the enthusiasm
showed by Spanish publishing houses for two of their novels, Volpi’s
En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor) and Padilla’s Amphytrion.
Volpi’s and Padilla’s works received Seix Barral’s Biblioteca Breve
award and Espasa Calpe’s Primavera award, respectively. Both texts
reflected the intention to produce autonomous works that were
also cosmopolitan and could come close to Carlos Fuentes’s 1969

description of the ideal Spanish American novel: “diverse, critical
and ambiguous” (Nueva 31). In their manifesto, Crack members had
expressed their desire to “develop narrations whose chronotope—to
use Bakhtin’s term—was zero/null: not tied to a specific place or
time, belonging at the same to all times and places and to none, as a
result of a mass media dominated world that makes specific temporal
or spatial connections impossible” (Chávez et al., “Manifiesto” 38).
Employing Borges-style plots, En busca de Klingsor and Amphitryon
study the effect of chance in the history of Europe, in narrations
that continue the cosmopolitan tradition in Mexican letters that
started with Ateneo de Juventud, Contemporáneos, and, above all,
the Medio Siglo generation, and which the group learned from the
works of Elizondo, Pitol, Pacheco, and García Ponce. Fuentes and
Cabrera Infante received the novel En busca de Klingsor positively
and it became the first international success of the literary group.
The Crack movement crossed the Atlantic in the fall of 2000, when
Mexico was invited to participate in the eighteenth edition of Liber
2000, Barcelona’s book fair. The Mexican group took center stage
during the fair as a result of Muchnik Publishing House’s publica-
tion of Tres bosquejos del mal and Palou’s novel Paraíso clausurado
(Condemned Paradise, 2000). The group’s international recognition
was accompanied by a change in its composition. Chávez Castañeda
did not travel to Spain, but Vicente Herrasti did, bringing to the sur-
face two stumbling blocks for critical studies of the group. In the first
place, it became unclear who the members of the Crack group were:
Was Chávez Castañeda part of the group, even though he had declared
himself marginal to the group and did not travel with them to Spain?
What was Alejandro Estivill’s situation now? These questions were
actually the tip of the iceberg as there were much more important
issues: Was the group open to accepting new members? Was it pos-
sible to talk about “Crack writers,” as it was initially announced, or it
was more appropriate to talk simply about “Crack novels”? What was
then the Crack movement? In order to study the question properly
one must first analyze which authors have been considered members
of the group—not an easy task given that there were no theoretical
guidelines. The second problem is the impossibility of finding a uni-
fied aesthetic position among the seven authors. Herrasti’s Diorama
(1998), a Gothic style story in which witchcraft appears as a theme
and as a narrative technique, had no antecedents in Mexican literature
with a few exceptions like Fuentes’s Aura, some of Francisco Tario’s
short stories, or “Langerhaus” by José Emilio Pacheco. Pedro Ángel
Palou’s literary career exemplifies the difficulty of finding a coherent

aesthetic position in this group. The structure and the polyphony
of his novel Memoria de los días show the text’s connection with the
Boom tradition. However, two novels he published in 1997 strayed
from the principles expressed in the manifesto. Bolero, a so-called
parody of romance novels, never fulfilled its promise, falling into a
sentimentalist style and a cliché view of existence similar to that of
the same Post-Boom generation to which the Crack group was sup-
posed to be an antidote. In El último campeonato mundial (The Last
World Championship, 1997), Palou attempted a comic experiment
with textual and extratextual materials, ranging from music scores to
billboards, in addition to ideographic characters, and pictures from
a variety of sources—including the famous Chinese torture picture
from Farabeuf—thus composing a pastiche whose theoretical ante-
cedents point to postmodern literature (Shaw 373–375). Should we
consider “Crack novels” works as diverse as Diorama, En busca de
Klingsor, Bolero, or El último campeonato mundial? Which ideas do
they share? Things have changed since the time of the manifesto and
it is no longer possible to establish a theoretical link connecting all
Crack texts. The topic requires a thorough study from a purely struc-
tural point of view because from 1996 to 2000 critics abandon the
label “Crack novels” that was applied to the five founding texts and
began to use the expression “Crack writers.”
In the twenty-first century, the group has diversified reflecting
the cosmopolitan life of the members—which in Padilla’s and Volpi’s
cases led them to diplomatic posts in cultural embassies in London
and Paris. Following the path opened by En busca de Klingsor, which
has been translated into twenty languages, novels written by Padilla,
Palou, Urroz, and Volpi have reached reading publics outside the
Spanish-speaking world. During this period, while the Crack group
actively participated in meetings with other Latin American writers
born in the 1960s—the most important ones being the Lengua de
Trapo and Casa América convention in Madrid in 1999, and the Seix
Barral meeting in Seville in 2004—the most significant project the
group undertook was the publication of Crack. Instrucciones de uso in
2004. The volume included for the first time essays from the seven
authors as well as the inaugural fiction, Variaciones sobre un tema
de Faulkner, written in 1989 but never published. Penned by the
seven members, the chapter “User’s Manual” updated the theoretical
principles expressed in the 1996 manifesto about the “total novel.”
New names, not mentioned in the first text, are now referred to as
precursors—Carpentier, Guimarães Rosa, Lezama Lima, Roa Bastos,
Piglia, and Bryce Echenique—along with authors from a universal

tradition—Beckett, Faulkner, and Kundera. The “Boom” is still
regarded as a model to follow—“we are citizens of the [Boom writ-
ers’] ‘country,’ and that dignifies us to the world” (Chávez et al., Crack
192)—and their rejection of the Post-Boom remains unchanged. The
Crack members also felt their movement possessed a family resem-
blance with other literary groups around the world, which shared
the same chronological time line, such as Colombia’s “Generación
mutante,” the British “All Hail the New Puritans,” Italy’s “Young
Cannibals,” and Fuguet and Gómez’s McOndo group. In contrast to
the much more serious tone of the 1996 manifesto, “User’s Manual”
had an ironic approach to literature, with which the group wanted
to underscore their “serious joke” position (Chávez et al., Crack 13).
For the same reason, they recognized Bolaño—not mentioned in
the manifesto—as a link between the Crack group and the previous
generations (Chávez et al., Crack 79).10 In 2006, the manifesto cel-
ebrated its tenth anniversary and Revista de la Universidad de México
used the occasion to publish a special issue with articles written by
Estivill, Padilla, Urroz, and Volpi, the group founders.
Since Spanish American modernismo there have been two tradi-
tional approaches to literature in the region. On the one hand, litera-
ture has been seen as reflecting Spanish American identity through
the use of local landscape, topics, and language (e.g. Romanticism,
Criollismo, writers such as Rulfo and Azuela). On the other hand,
a parallel tradition champions the idea of a Latin American novel
that does not use as its immediate referent Latin American geogra-
phy, moves away from the linguistic characteristic of the region, and
broadens its horizons, including points of view from the outside as
the immediate social context of Latin American writers’ reality (e.g.,
modernismo, avant-garde literature, Alfonso Reyes, and Borges). As
happened with the Boom writers, the Crack group members rejected
simplistic definitions and have learned to be at the same time Latin
American and cosmopolitan, fusing two previously antagonistic tra-
ditions. Just like one could study the Boom literature from either
the perspective of each individual member or as a group aesthetics,
the work of the seven Crack members possesses an individual aes-
thetic project, which links them to different literary currents or nar-
rative subgenres, without losing their group identity. However, the
same variety of narrative directions makes it impossible to classify the
movement as a literary style.
Thus, among the Crack’s texts, Eloy Urroz’s work resembles the
Boom literature the most because of its subversion of lineal chronology,
the story-within-the-story structure—Las almas abatidas (Depressed

Souls, 2000) and Un siglo tras de mí (A Century After Me, 2004)—
the construction of autonomous/poetic worlds—Las Rémoras—and
his homages to international authors and works—La familia inter-
rumpida (Interrupted Family, 1999). Urroz’s novelistic writing
owes a debt to Vargas Llosa’s influence in terms of his questioning
of love and sex as an existential last resort, even though his most
recent period—Fricción (Friction, 2008)—has evolved into grotesque
and bakhtinian realism, similar to Pitol’s Domar a la divina garza
(Taming the Divine Heron, 1988) or Donoso’s Donde van a morir los
elefantes (Where the Elephants Are Going to Die, 1995). According
to Quintana Tejera, Urroz “finds himself the head of the young crack
members’ creative process” (55). Ignacio Padilla’s work—author of Si
hace Crack es Boom (If It Cracks It’s Boom, 2007), a brief autobio-
graphical essay about the group—focuses on achieving mastery of the
short story and possesses a neoclassical preoccupation with style. He
quickly abandoned his magical realist origins a la Juan Rulfo—La cat-
edral de los ahogados (Cathedral of the Drowned, 1995)—and reached
maturity with his search for cosmopolitan/international settings, and
a normalization of the absurd that reminds one of Borges, Onetti,
or Pitol, as well as other authors from different European traditions.
One can easily see this in the grotesque characters in Amphitryon, the
defenseless narrator in Espiral de artillería (Artillery’s Spiral, 2004),
the crazy passengers in Las antípodas y el siglo (Antipodes and the
Century, 2001), the impossible sherpa in La Gruta del Toscano (The
Tuscan’s Grotto, 2006), or the extravagant inventors and rural detec-
tives in El daño no es de ayer (The Problems Didn’t Start Yesterday,
2011). Javier Sánchez Zapatero described Padilla as “one of those
writers incapable of writing a bad paragraph” (7). Jorge Volpi’s work
has been translated into over twenty languages. His narrations are
usually structured as an essay-novel with heavy philosophical content,
emphasizing Mexican history and literature—A pesar del oscuro silen-
cio (In Spite of the Silence, 1992), La paz de los sepulcros (The Tombs’
Peace, 1995), and Días de ira—as well as the Western humanistic
tradition—La tejedora de sombras (The Weaver of Shadows, 2012),
or the trilogy of the twentieth century composed of En busca de
Klingsor, El fin de la locura (The End of Madness, 2003), and No
será la Tierra (It Won’t Be Earth, 2006). His search for knowledge
leads to a Socratic skepticism whose precursor is Borges. In 1999,
Carlos Fuentes stated that he felt a “special pride and satisfaction in
Jorge Volpi’s arrival to the literary world stage; death is unavoidable,
but so is the continuity of life” (“Encontrando”). Pedro Ángel Palou
(1966), author of twenty novels in a variety of genres and topics,

uses fictional prose as a lab for aesthetic experiments and philosophi-
cal disquisitions—Paraíso clausurado—and as historical chronicle—
Zapata (2006), Cuauthémoc. La defensa del quinto sol (Cuathemoc.
Defending the Fifth Sun, 2008), Morelos: Morir es nada (Morelos:
To Die is Nothing, 2007), or El impostor (The Impostor, 2012);
at times he also explores a lyrical romanticism—Demasiadas vidas
(Too Many Lives, 2001), La casa de la magnolia (Magnolia House,
2004), Qlipoth (2003), or La profundidad de la piel (Skin Depth,
2010). The diversity of his work possesses a common thread in his
existential disillusionment, inherited from the skepticism of Cioran,
Pessoa, Unamuno, or Villaurrutia. For Daniel Sada, Palou writes
“the literature that we were needing” in the Mexican literary field
(Sada). Chávez Castañeda’s work receives the influence of film and
apocalyptic literature. It carries a bitter metaphysical tone that origi-
nates in a Nietzschean apocalyptic view—La conspiración idiota and
Estación de la vergüenza (Season of Shame,1999), or in connection
to the deepest unconscious motives—El fin de la pornografía (The
End of Pornography, 2005), or Severiana (2011)—or as a result of
greater social or nocturnal catastrophes, which he employs as met-
aphors of spiritual decadence—El día del hurón (The Day of the
Ferret, 1997) and El libro del silencio (The Book of Silence, 2006).
In contrast, Alejandro Estivill (1963) has only produced one novel,
El hombre bajo la piel (The Man Under the Skin, 2002), “perhaps
the most significant book in recent literature because of its quality
and strangeness” (Chávez and Santajuliana 45). In his novel, Estivill
employs a stream of consciousness technique that seeks to rescue the
“superman” hidden behind the personality of a Mexican professor
of theology residing, amid other strange characters, in an apartment
building in Boston. Finally, Vicente Herrasti was the last person to
join the Crack group and his fiction has evolved from the depiction
of European-style architectural, urban, and natural landscapes, such
as those present in Taxidermia (Taxidermy, 1994) and Diorama,
to the recreation of classical rhetoric in La muerte del filósofo (The
Philosopher’s Death, 2003), stringing together a series of novels,
which, as critics have noted, “moves away and is unconcerned with
the latest literary fashions” (Ríos 1999).
With respect to its reception, the Crack phenomenon cannot be
understood today without the dialogue it has maintained with its pub-
lic, with literary critics, and journalists since its foundation in 1996.
Its ties to mass media, a sine qua non condition of writing in the
twenty-first century, has kept the Crack alive, giving it a new identity
and defining it in a way that moves away from the authors’ intentions.
In that sense, it is a situation not unique in the literary field, where a
variety of factors that have no relation to an author’s intention affect
the historical value assigned to a work of art. On many occasions,
extraliterary circumstances have determined the success of a writer
while leaving the aesthetic projects of his contemporaries to oblivion,
or restricting the influence of their works to local tradition. Thus, for
example, in contrast to the worldwide popularity of García Márquez,
very few readers outside Colombia know Mejía Vallejo, the best rep-
resentative of the Andean culture in Colombian literature. Carlos
Fuentes’s international fame was not achieved by any of his fellow
Generación de Medio Siglo members. And Macedonio Fernández’s
fame pales in comparison to that of his disciple, Borges. In the case of
the Crack group, one could talk about four stages of reception by the
Mexican, Spanish, and international public.
The Crack’s initial reception in the Mexican literary environment
was unanimously negative. They were accused of being a public-
ity stunt for the purpose of selling Nueva Imagen’s books. Others
complained about their self-appointment as the messianic group that
was going to save the literary world at the end of the century. They
were also criticized for assuming the dual role of writers and critics of
their own texts. Christopher Domínguez Michael spoke at the time
of “generational self-promotion with questionable results” (“Bronca”
29). Guillermo Fadanelli, a representative writer of the “dirty real-
ism” or the paperback literature that the Crack rejected, accused the
group of having declared themselves gods who can decide what lit-
erature “should be.”11 Calling the group a literary mafia—not unlike
the one Luis Guillermo Piazza described in his controversial 1968
novel—some critics prophesied the group would break up soon.12
Among the critical articles against the Crack published in 1996 and
1997, which appeared in “Sábado” and “El Ángel,” unomásuno and
Reforma newspapers’ cultural supplements respectively, but also in El
financiero, Vuelta, and Novedades, one deserving of special attention
is Gerardo Laveaga’s review. In spite of his lack of historical perspec-
tive, Laveaga was the first to point out a problem that continues to
plague the group to this day, that is, the absence of unifying form and
content among the works of the seven members—five at that time—
who a decade later had published over seventy novels. At the time, it
was already problematic having to decide whether to analyze the nov-
els or to focus exclusively on the group’s theoretical position. Chávez,
Padilla, Urroz, and Volpi have repeatedly complained that during that
period there was never any attempt to study the group by analyzing
the texts; critics only focused on the supposedly public objectives of

the movement. Pedro Ángel Palou described it as the critics giving
more attention to gestures than to textuality (Regalado).
The second stage coincides with the international acclaim the group
received after 1999, as a result of Volpi’s and Padilla’s awards and
the publications by Muchnik. With a few exceptions—see Aparicio
Maydeu’s article in ABC as an example—the Spanish press gave the
group the recognition that was denied to them in their native coun-
try. El País dubbed them the Mexican “dream team” and praised their
“vast culture, their provocative intelligence, a charming and acces-
sible arrogance, and their love for literature” (Mora). García Jambrina
called for the public to “pay attention to a group of writers who have
been working for several years in the shadows, against the grain, for
the creation of literature with capital letters” (Jambrina). In Mexico,
on the other hand, the debate continued. Mauricio Montiel attacked
the authors for focusing on the book market, leaving aside “that
great battle with the terrifying angel that is language” (Montiel). For
Fadanelli, Seix Barral’s granting of an award to En busca de Klingsor
simply meant that Biblioteca Breve was “no longer as significant as it
once was” (“Padilla y Urroz” 27). As another example of the critical
reception in Mexico, Armando Pereira excluded the Crack movement
from his Diccionario de literatura Mexicana: siglo XX (Dictionary
of Twentieth Century Mexican Literature, 2000), while other move-
ments and literary groups less known internationally were included.
The third stage is determined by the expansion of the Crack out-
side the Spanish-speaking world, with positive reviews and articles
by critics such as Ramon Chao for Le Monde (“Jorge Volpi, chef de
file du groupe ‘Crack,’ ” 2001) or Nicole Laforte in The New York
Times (“New Era Succeeds Years of Solitude,” 2003). Academia has
become aware of the phenomenon and there are PhD dissertations
about the group—or in some case about specific members—in uni-
versities in Mexico, Spain, France, the United States, and even South
Korea. There are classes studying the Crack as a movement or genera-
tion in Diego Portales University in Chile, the University of León in
Spain, and the University of Houston in the United States. Prestigious
critics such as Phillip Swanson in the United States and Jorge Luis
de la Fuente in Spain have helped steer the academic opinion toward
a view of the Crack as heirs of the great Latin American narrative
epitomized by the Boom writers.13 In Mexico, however, the uneasy
relationship between Crack members and critics continues to exist.
Domínguez Michael published the most controversial article about
the topic to date with the title “Pathology of Reception.” Michael
criticizes the superficiality of the project, questioning its “false” cos-

mopolitan nature and justifying its success due to the ignorance of
the Spanish public and journalism—resulting from a postcolonial
situation—about the Mexican narrative.14 The group has also been
criticized for the use of an anglophilic name and their “cut and paste”
idea of literature (Castillo 85).
There is a fourth stage of the Crack’s critical reception that very
likely will determine its position within the Latin American cultural
tradition. On the one hand, Carlos Fuentes devotes a chapter of his
essay La gran novela latinoamericana (The Great Latin American
Novel, 2011) to the group, describing it thus:
It means crash, exaggeration, innovation and fissure. It means crazi-

ness, conversation and, all of it, announces with its explosive sound
the arrival of something new. The Crack is the first literary genera-
tion that names itself after the Boom . . . The Crack, in its own way,
was another—unavoidable—skirmish as is any movement of renewal.
(360–361)
On the other hand, a new generation—writers born a decade after

the Crack members—decided to react against the Crack discourse,
unintentionally granting the group a place within a literary cycle of
tradition and rupture. Thus, in the preface to Spanish Granta’s issue
devoted to the best young writers in Spanish—but only limited to
those born in the 1970s—the editors, Aurelio Mayors and Valerie
Miles, openly question the aesthetics of the Crack and other gen-
erational groups, arguing that “time has revealed their limitations
and their immaturity. Do we have to explain that even if one aspires
to break with or interrupt collectively a literary tradition (Chile’s
McOndo, Mexico’s Crack, Spain’s Nocilla), talent is individual and
only one writer is needed to alter our reading of the past and the
future?” (7). Peruvian writer Diego Trelles Paz was especially criti-
cal of the Mexican movement, to which he accused—along with
Colombia’s “Generación Mutante”—of being “closer to a marketing
curiosity than a serious attempt to create a literary movement” (18).15
This type of reaction has a secondary effect: it assigns a place to the
generation born in the 1960s in the context of the history of narrative
in Latin America. Young new writers reject the Crack, deny its impor-
tance, but by being deliberately against it, they are recognizing it as
part of a literary tradition. Although they argue that these groups had
no impact, they accept them as part of a literary and publishing field
they want to belong to. Almost unknowingly they canonize the Crack
group and their contemporaries as a model or as an example of the

literature they want to move away from. If we apply Pierre Boudieu’s
theory of the literary field—which Eduardo Becerra has suggested
in his article “¿Qué hacemos con el abuelo?” (What Do We Do with
the Grandfather?)—a plausible hypothesis would be that the Crack
members, like other writers born in the 1960s, have modified the
rules of the literary field.16 It is possible that the battle between the
Crack group and previous generations, as well as the group’s search
for recognition, are over and now a new dialectic between younger
writers and the Crack group begins.
In spite of all the criticism, this type of debate is one of the ele-
ments necessary for the Crack’s survival in literary and academic
circles. Perhaps it is the essential factor that will determine their rel-
evance in the future. However, criticism also brings many worrisome
problems such the misinterpretations that have spread due to new
communication technologies, contributing dangerously to the mud-
dying of the term “Crack literature.” Critics Curiel Rivera, Rubén
Hernández, and, above all, Alex Salmon, reviewer for the Spanish
newspaper El Mundo, have erroneously noticed a rupture instead of a
continuation between the Crack group and their literary “grandpar-
ents,” the Boom and the Generación de Medio Siglo. Even worse is
the list of writers that have been associated with the movement even
though they share few characteristics with the actual group members.
Victims of this lack of critical precision are novelists Mario Bellatin
(Miklós 25); Susana Pagano (Lucas); Pablo Soler Frost, the author of
novels like La mano derecha (The Right Hand, 1993) set in far away
places; Adrián Curiel Rivera, who paradoxically has attacked the iden-
tity of the Crack group; Josefina Estrada; and Cristina Rivera, who
has been constantly being forced to publicly disassociate herself from
the group (Hong and Macías Rodríguez). Tomás Regalado, who par-
ticipated in the project, Crack. Instrucciones de uso in 2004, has been
mentioned as member of the group occasionally (Ferrero Campos
440), while Carlos Fuentes included Padilla, Palou, Urroz, and Volpi
in the group but also Rivera Garza and Xavier Velasco, author of
Diablo guardián (Guardian Devil, 2003). The best example of the
kind of criticism that does not help readers understand this period
is Enrique Vila-Matas’s article “Otras voces” (Other Voices) where
under the term Crack, the critic decided to include an entire genera-
tion of writers born in the 1950s and 1960s who seemed to follow
the Boom’s aesthetic tradition. According to Vila-Matas, this would
include Mexican writers Daniel Sada and Juan Villaro, Argentines
Gonzalo Garcés, César Aira, and Rodrigo Fresán, Guatemalan
Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and Chilean Arturo Fontaine.17 Slowly, a few ste-
reotypes about the Crack have emerged and it is imperative to classify
and study them. With their manifesto it was understood that they
presented an avant-garde interpretation of writing as a literature of
rupture, but the Crack has grounded their origins in Mexican, Latin
American, and universal narrative traditions. As opposed to those
who consider them writers interested in German topics, only four
Crack novels, five percent of the group’s entire production, focuses on
the topic of Nazism in Europe: Padilla’s Amphitryon, Volpi’s En busca
de Klingsor and Oscuro bosque oscuro (Dark Dark Forest, 2009), and
Palou’s Malheridos (Badly Injured, 2003). In response to the accusa-
tion that they produce “escapist” literature and their supposed lack of
interest in Mexican identity, one can point out that less than a dozen
novels avoid local topics, while the rest has as main protagonists lead-
ers of the Mexican independence movement (Palou’s Morelos: morir
es nada), central figures of the Mexican Revolution (Zapata by Palou
and Fricción by Urroz), or contemporary writers (A pesar del oscuro
silencio (Despite the Dark Silence, 1992) by Volpi, and En la alcoba de
un mundo (In the World’s Bedroom, 1992) by Palou.
No one questions the connections between the Crack and the
Boom—it is in fact one of their aesthetic principles—but extraliter-
ary factors in their respective historical period makes it impossible
to see both movements as similar. They both emerged in periods in
which the Spanish publishing houses were flourishing and served as
a catalytic agent for Latin American narrative, helping authors from
the region reach international recognition. There are similarities: in
1999, Seix Barral renewed the Biblioteca Breve award after a hiatus of
twenty-seven years and many saw in literary agent Antonia Kerrigan a
symbolic heir to Carmen Balcells in the publishing world. However,
in the 1960s there was no concept of globalization or the erasing of
national boundaries so predominant at the end of the twentieth cen-
tury. No one can deny that in the last few decades that there has been a
modification of the concept of the nation that for many years was one
of the ideological bases of the Boom. The advances in communication
technology, the advent of the Internet and e-mail, have created a new
concept of geographical frontier and have transformed the cultural
dialogue between Latin America and the world. In Aires de familia.
Cultura y sociedad en América Latina (Family Resemblance. Culture
and Society in Latin America, 2000), Carlos Monsiváis has shown that
worldwide changes brought about a new postmodern period in the
subcontinent—changes partly driven by an ever-increasing attraction
to the lifestyle in the most advanced countries—which has exerted
an influence that gradually began three decades earlier, has spread to

popular culture and only recently has begun to affect the distribution
of the literary texts.18 The new Latin American writers have greatly
benefited from this, now having access to a large quantity of transla-
tions that before the 1990s canonical writers could only dream about.
To criticize the Crack writers because of their marketing strategies
means to isolate them from the market forces that began to control the
distribution of literature toward the end of the twentieth century and
the beginning of the twenty-first century; market forces that must be
seen as a necessary evil that benefit even consecrated writers from the
Boom and Post-Boom eras. Even though the global book market has
facilitated the distribution of cultural products in Latin America, one
cannot avoid noticing the contrast between the revolutionary opposi-
tion to capitalism in the 1960s—an ideology widespread throughout
the region—and the new cultural links with first world countries in
the twenty-first century. This is a fact that must be taken into account
when contrasting the Boom and the Crack periods. The members of
the new generation of writers only had to react to North American
global capitalism, and they have done it with irony as in the famous
preface to Fuguet and Gómez’s McOndo.
During the Boom years, there were actions and situations that
would be impossible to duplicate today: bringing together intellec-
tuals and writers in support of the Cuban Revolution, the constant
communication among authors from different nations sharing a sense
of political, cultural, and economic antiimperialism and a defensive
reaction to the threat represented by the emergence of dictatorships
in the Southern Cone. The 1959 Cuban Revolution was a historical
event that brought together many intellectuals ideologically from that
period and the Boom writers were not an exception. They did not hide
their commitment with the Left but they avoided at all times turn-
ing their literature into a political pamphlet.19 In a survey conducted
by Casa de las Américas, an important literary periodical published
by the revolutionary Cuban government since the 1960s, Vargas
Llosa and Cortázar reaffirmed their faith in socialism but defended
at the same time the autonomy of their literary works with respect to
their ideological position, thus expressing an opinion characteristic
of the relationship between literature and politics at the time. The
Crack authors have never conceived of the novel as in instrument of
direct social or ideological change as even the Post-Boom authors like
Allende, Benedetti, or Giardinelli did, even though Urroz, Padilla,
and Volpi have published sociopolitical essays.20 Like the Boom, the
Crack possesses an exclusive commitment to language in a specific
literary sense, something that Rodríguez Monegal called “aesthetic

engagement” (142). The absence of any social or ideological pro-
nouncements in the Crack Manifesto and subsequent theoretical
texts forces us to question the existence of any political intention in
the group’s initial ideas. There is an absence of the ideological center
that defines every literary generation. Javier Sicilia called these narra-
tors born in the 1960s members of “a generation without debates,”
Chávez Castañeda spoke of a “cold generation,” and not even the
outcome of the elections in 2000 or 2012 have enough historical
significance to have an effect on their literary texts. As much as crit-
ics insist on calling the Crack a generation, it is not: in spite of the
authors having been born in the same date range, sharing a similar
educational background, and being longtime friends, they do not
possess an uniform aesthetic point of view and their group did not
come about as the upshot of a historical crisis that brought the mem-
bers together.21
From a purely literary point of view, the Crack takes part in the
idea of tradition and renovation, classicism and avant-garde, continu-
ity and rupture that authors like Jorge Cuesta and Octavio Paz have
employed to explain the emergence of new generations in Spanish
American literary history. Coining the expression “a tradition of rup-
ture,” Octavio Paz was able to organize the history of literary currents
in the region. In the first chapter of Los hijos del limo (Children of the
Mire, 1974), the Mexican poet asserted that antiquity is a beginning,
not an end, that the past is the future, and that the “past” is a time
that dies and resuscitates at the end of each cycle: modernity is the
same as tradition or, in other words, Mexican and Spanish American
literatures are founded on a principle of rupture and continuity.22
Recurrence is the remedy for change and extinction; the past waits at
the end of each cycle. The past is an age to come. The future offers a
double image: the end of time and its rebirth, the corruption of the
archetypal past and its resurrection. The end of the cycle is the restora-
tion of the original past—and the beginning of its inevitable downfall.
(Paz 11)
From the Latin traditio, meaning to hand down, tradition is a literary

identity constructed out of a cyclical process of death and resurrection
that is conscious of its historical position and acquires value updat-
ing the works that precedes it without consideration for institutional,
nationalist, or market forces. In the case of the Crack members, by
attaching themselves theoretically to foundational elements of the
Mexican tradition—groups like, Contemporáneos, la Generación de

Medio Siglo; writers like, Cuesta, Fuentes, or Pitol, among ot hers—
and a Spanish American tradition—Borges, Onetti, Cortázar, Donoso
and Vargas Llosa, only to mention the most representative writers—
they take part in this cyclical movement between the past and the
present, updating those traditions here and now with their literary
creations and erasing boundaries between the old and the new. The
Crack’s best chance of survival in the twenty-first century is their
connection to this historical cycle. Many consecrated Mexican
authors have accepted to sit cordially at the table with their literary
grandchildren. In 2000, Sergio Pitol celebrated the importance of the
dialectic between the critics and the Crack: “I feel great pleasure in
the success of the Crack group . . . And what really makes me glad is
the jealousy of those critics who attacked them. The Crack has given
us a lesson because of their professionalism and seriousness towards
literary creation” (Salmon). In 2003, Elena Poniatowska published an
article in La Jornada entitled “Box y literatura del Crack” (Boxing
and Crack Literature) in which she praised the arrival of the group
to the Mexican literary scene and their connection with the litera-
ture written during the Boom era.23 Carlos Fuentes claimed not to
know anything about the Crack in June 2000: “I have read about that
‘Crack generation’ and I wonder what it is” (Islas), but a few months
later he admitted that “I owe them more than they will ever owe me”
(Rituerto 24). In a 2005 interview, Fuentes called some of the Crack
members “my beloved sons” (Pallais) and, as mentioned above, even
dedicated a chapter of La gran novela latinoamericana to the group.
As with other terms that have been used to provide an overview
of the Spanish American narrative after 1970—Post-Boom, post-
modernism, and boomerang, among others—historical perspective
will be the only tool that will allow critics to determine each author,
group, or style a place within turn of the century literature. With
respect to the future of the Crack, one can imagine two possible sce-
narios or paths. In the first one, the term evolves negatively reaching
a lack of clarity, including writers and works from styles very differ-
ent to the original intention; the Crack members’ marketing tech-
nique and the lack of precision of their critical approaches reduces
the Crack’s importance, into being nothing more than a group of
independent works. In the second scenario the Crack becomes repre-
sentative of an entire generation of narrators from different countries
in Latin America born after the 1960s who have become known and
translated in other countries. In a strictly aesthetic sense, these writ-
ers renovated the Latin American literary tradition while remaining
within it. Both hypotheses include endless critical possibilities, inter-

mediate paths—I have only mentioned the two extremes and the
two less likely to happen. In any case, the Crack writers were able to
acknowledge that only in Latin America, among all the regions of
the world, were the representatives of a tradition that were also the
group’s founding fathers still alive. Perhaps someday, as part of this
furious cycle of tradition and rupture, past and present, classicism and
avant-garde, the roles will be inverted and time will put these writ-
ers in the same role of precursors they now grant the Boom writers.
Perhaps that moment is already here.
Notes
1. The purpose of Variaciones sobre un tema de Faulkner was writing a
parody of Mexican rural literature common places and Juan Rulfo’s
imitators. The text would be full of “drinks, colors and passions,
pointy mustaches and a mark made with a machete” and also “a few
brushstrokes, noises, perennial dust on the ground, spinsters, and
the everyday events of a small town where everything always returns”
(Chávez et al., Crack 34).
2. Salvador Elizondo’s novel possesses a complex metafictional frame-
work through the use of narrative as a hermetic and indecipherable
sign and above all in the conjunction between the thanatic, the erotic
and the enigmatic that is condensed in the famous photograph of
Chinese torture included in the 1965 novel.
3. Nueva Imagen published El temperamento melancólico, Las Rémoras
and Si volviesen sus majestades in 1996. A year before, Joaquín
Mortiz had printed Memoria de los días while La conspiración idiota
remained unpublished until 2003, when Alfaguara Mexico finally
published it. In 1997, Nueva Imagen published Chávez’s El día del
hurón and Palou’s Bolero. Within the span of two years, five Crack
novels came out.
4. The manifesto was divided into five autonomous sections, signed by
each one of the authors. Given the difficulty in finding the original
copy of the manifesto published in Descritura, critics tend to quote
from its reprint in Lateral. A Spanish magazine, Lateral published
the manifesto in September 2000 and through its Web site the docu-
ment reached a worldwide audience.
5. The Crack authors derived the term “novela profunda” from the
Spanish translation Brushwood’s study. In English, Brushwood
employed the expression “deeply searching novel” (28).
6. Glantz described the concept of escritura thus: “escritura is for fic-
tion what still life is for painting: the creation of objects whose own
essence limits them; they do not point to or refer to any reality other
than their own because they are purely mental creations which exist
in their own space, a space limited by their own nature and from
which there is no escape” (18).
7. As the title of the anthology suggests, Fuguet and Gómez’s preface
is an attack against magical realism, which originated out of the need
for the Latin American writers to represent the cultural, political,
and economic contradictions of their geographic region under glo-
balization: “the name (a registered trademark?) is a joke, of course,
a satire . . . Our McOndo is as Latin American and magical (exotic?)
as the real Macondo (which, by the way, is not real but virtual). Our
country, McOndo, is bigger, overpopulated and full of smog. It has
highways, subways, Cable TV, and neighborhoods. In McOndo there
are McDonald’s, Mac computers, and condominiums. There are also
five star hotels erected with laundered money and gigantic malls”
(McOndo 15).
8. In his influential article “Tradicionalismo y modernidad en la cul-
tura latinoamericana,” Brunner defined macondismo in the following
terms: “one can identify that response with the symbol of Macondo,
not as a result of an analysis of García Márquez’s work, but because
of the way it has been received and is employed in some intellectual
circles. What exactly is macondismo? First of all, it is an interpreta-
tion of Latin America through literature, or more specifically is a
product of the stories we tell to each other . . . our identity. Second of
all, the belief that those stories are constitutive of Latin American
reality, that is, that they “produce” that reality as a text within which
we would be obligated to recognize ourselves . . . Macondo is a meta-
phor for the mysterious, or magical realist, aspect of Latin America;
an essence that reason cannot classify . . . Macondo has become a
code word we can employ to name or allude to anything we cannot
understand, or we do not know, or surprises us because it is new”
(63–64).
9. José Donoso made a similar observation with respect to Boom writ-
ers during the 1970s: “exile is another one of the legendary elements
that Latin American critics rarely forgive, criticizing writers who ‘live
distant from national problems’ and accusing them of cosmopolitan
uprootedness” (72).
10. In his blog, part of El Boomeran(g) website, Volpi explained the
importance of the Chilean writer as a generational bridge: “Bolaño
admired the Boom writers’ aesthetic risks as much as he hated their
complacency, their Latin American faith, their hegemonic dis-
course,” “because of its structure and ambitious narrative style, Los
detectives salvajes and 2666 are direct heirs of Cien años de soledad, La
casa verde, Terra nostra or Rayuela. Ideologically speaking, however,
they are the opposite” and “Why Bolaño? Perhaps because more than
anyone he pushed the limits of the Boom aesthetics. And because
with the same force he rejected the Boom’s view of what a Latin
American writer should be” (Volpi, “Breve guía”).
11. Parodying the Crack writers’ tone, Fadanelli asserts: “we are not
communicating with humankind but with God. Our literature is not
mortal; it is transcendent. We know that you can be intelligent, you
are not what they have made you believe you are, you only need faith.
I think this face is the face of Christ himself. The time for being humble
has long passed. Why wait, with stupid oriental wisdom, until things
fall into place? If there is something in our favor it is that we have
stood up in the name of how things ‘should be’ ” (14).
12. Guadalupe Sánchez Nettel advanced the following hypothesis
regarding the future of the group, which in her opinion was going
to end in failure: “it is very likely that, driven by their discrepancies,
these five narrators will separate or, at least, the group will not be
able to continue with the same vibrant dynamic that has characterize
it until now” (47). Six years later, Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán
defined the Crack group as a “combination of great friendships that,
like all great friendships, will unavoidably become weaker or will
disappear” (59).
13. Philip Swanson highlighted the value of the Crack as heirs of the
1960s Boom novels: “Though without the artificial structural pyro-
technics of some Boom novels, the serious yet playful, complex yet
compelling quality of their eminently marketable professional fic-
tions makes the likes of Volpi and Padilla, if anything, the true heirs
of the Boom” (103). José Luis de la Fuente defined the Crack as
“a will to create a literature in which the main protagonist is litera-
ture itself, a characteristic that links the group to a Borgesean tradi-
tion in Spanish American letters” (236).
14. For Domínguez Michael the Crack group’s international recognition
results from Spanish critics’ lack of knowledge about Latin American
literature: “the fraud that there was a new Mexican novel simply
because there was no mention of Mexico or the Mexicans in the text,
convinced Madrid’s generally obtuse journalists whose knowledge is
limited to the information they get through the Círculo de Lectores
book club and Casa de América” (49). Domínguez Michael refers to
one of the traditional means of publishing dissemination in Spain (the
Reader’s Circle), but also to the space in which numerous writers,
journalists, critics, and Spanish professors have the opportunity to live
within Latin American culture without needing to move from Spain
(the House of America, situated in the Cibeles Plaza in Madrid).
15. Here is Trelles Paz’s quotation: “Closer to advertisements than seri-
ous formulations of literary movements, much more attentive to their
impact and the media’s agenda than they were to a need for expres-
sion or the discovery of a shared sensibility, deeply infatuated with
the patronage of the recognized writers who would publicly validate
a ghost movement ready to increase the sales of novels in Spanish
bookstores—literally, at any cost—Crack and [the Columbian move-
ment] Nueva Ola can’t be considered seriously in this text” (xvii).
16. If we apply Bourdieu’s point of view to contemporary Latin American

narrative, labels such as Crack, McOndo, or boomerang can be con-
sidered “words, names of schools or groups, proper names—they
only have such importance because they make things into something:
distinctive signs, they produce existence in a universe where to exist
is to be different, ‘to make oneself a name,’ a proper name or a name
in common (that of a group)” (157).
17. In Crack. Instrucciones de uso, Volpi expressed with irony that “Crack
members also consider as Crack members the following fellow travel-
ers, irrespective of their will: Cristina Rivera Garza, Mario Bellatin,
Rosa Beltrán, Mario González Suárez, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Alberto
Fuguet, Santiago Gamboa, José Manuel Prieto, Belén Gopegui,
Rodrigo Fresán, and Fernando Iwasaki” (Chávez et al., Crack 180).
18. According to Monsiváis, “in the second half of the twentieth century,
the masses consume in their own way what in the past had fascinated
the elite. The devotion to the ‘American’ lifestyle (comfort, tech-
nology, individualism, the automobile as a search for new horizons)
is overwhelming. Once again, ideological messages are mistaken for
indispensable contributions and the competitive mentality of those
who cannot compete leads them to buy television sets, radios, blend-
ers, tape recorders, washing machines, and computers. The seduction
is very effective because it equates any form of consumption with an
ideological surrendering and with a rejection of criticism, thus giving
the culture industry an excessive influence” (225–226).
19. For José Miguel Oviedo, “the Cuban Revolution was a catalytic
phenomenon in the political, cultural and artistic life of the sub-
continent. Intellectuals learned a beautiful lesson from that first—
and until now, only—socialist revolution in America: the utopia had
become a difficult and conflictive reality, but, for the same reason,
it was even more praiseworthy; it was no longer enough to defend it,
one had to rethink everything and act accordingly” (432).
20. See Urroz’s El águila, la serpiente y el tucán (The Eagle, the Serpent
and the Toucan, 2000), Padilla’s La isla de las tribus perdidas (The
Island of the Lost Tribes, 2010) and Arte y olvido del terremoto
(Earthquake’s Art and Oblivion, 2010) and Volpi’s La imaginación
y el poder (Imagination and Power, 1998), La guerra y las palabras
(The War and the Words, 2004), and El insomnio de Bolívar (Bolivar’s
Insomnia, 2010).
21. We cannot but agree with Adolfo Prieto, who in his study of twen-
tieth-century Latin American narrative, pointed out that “the con-
cept of generational conflict should not be overvalued to the point
of finding in it the motor of history or assigning it the role of an
organizing agent of the most important social movements” (407).
In this essay, I have chosen to employ Rodríguez Monegal’s descrip-
tion of group to define the Crack: “it would be best to . . . talk about
groups rather than generations. Or, if one talks about generations, it
must remain clear that generations are not static, there are no fixed
group characteristics, and that some of the most original authors do
not represent their generations—they go beyond them” (155).
22. I agree with Octavio Paz’s definition in the opening chapter of
Children of the Mire: “[Tradition means handing down to the next
generation cultural elements such as legends, stories, beliefs, cos-
tumes, literary and artistic forms, ideas, styles. Therefore, any inter-
ruption of that transmission is tantamount to breaking tradition.]
The title of this chapter, ‘A tradition against itself,’ at first seems
a contradiction. Can ‘tradition’ be that which severs the chain and
interrupts the continuity? Could this negation become a tradition
without denying itself? The tradition of discontinuity implies the
negation not only of tradition but of discontinuity as well. Nor is the
contradiction resolved by replacing the phrase ‘a tradition against
itself’ with words less obviously contradictory—such as ‘the Modern
Tradition.’ How can the modern be traditional?” (1).
23. Poniatowska wrote that “years ago Kid Palou, Kid Volpi, Kid Urroz,
Kid Padilla, Kid Chávez Castañeda, Kid Herrasti knocked out the
Mexican literature mafias—the groups working for Vuelta, Nexos,
and La cultura en México—with a manifesto. Nothing written in the
past was valuable, all writers were a piece of shit, one had to forget
about them because the only future was in the ‘Crack,’ which means
fissure, a bone that breaks, a glass that shatters, a branch that falls
from a tree and makes that sound: crack. As time went on, the angry
youngsters became less harsh and helped those they knocked out to
get up, dressed their wounds, put a band-aid over their eyebrows, and
gave their literary grandparents—Salvador Elizondo, Juan García
Ponce, Sergio Pitol, Juan Vicente Melo, Fernando del Paso, all of
them born in the 1930s—a big and sweaty hug” (Poniatowska).
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Chapter 4
Deep Literature and Dirty Realism:

Rupture and Continuity in the Canon
Gerardo Cruz-Grunerth
T he 1960s and 1970s saw Latin America come to the forefront

of international attention. From the triumphal spirit of the Cuban
Revolution and its influence on the rest of the region to the oppres-
sion and repressive violence of numerous military dictatorships, lit-
erature and editorial production were nourished by the impulse of
this historical moment. As a result of increased attention, the literary
production of this time, which came to be known as the Boom, had
the opportunity to access European publishing houses and gain a sig-
nificantly bigger market. The Boom also signified a reformulation of
the Latin American literary canon. Thus, the Boom became a point
of departure as two Mexican literary groups theorized a revision of
the canon thirty years later. The Crack Manifesto and MoHo, the
manifesto of dirty realist writers, introduce two distinct aesthetics
that express tension yet harmony with the established canon in their
own way. Given that both movements propose an “end” of Latin
American literature, it is essential to explore both their manifes-
tos as well as representative works—Jorge Volpi’s El temperamento
melancólico (The Melancholic Temperament, 1996) for the Crack
writers and Guillermo Fadanelli’s Lodo (Mud, 2002) for MoHo—in
order to better understand the inheritance these authors receive from
the Boom and the revision they attempt to make of the canon.
To talk of the Boom includes a recognition of certain elements—
formal, thematic, and discursive characteristics—which unify these
texts and make them form a heterogeneous yet real literary group.
This leads Fernando Aínsa to argue that “Aesthetic ideas do not elim-
inate the stressful demands reality imposes, but rather those demands
become the work’s best incentive” (Narrativa 52–53). Aínsa describes
86 G e r a r d o C r u z- G r u n e r t h
the problematic of a literature that was still portraying Latin America’s

social problems while distancing itself from the propaganda thinly
veiled as a revolutionary discourse. These texts denounced military
intervention and state oppression, as well as other topics that were
often the target of censorship and repression, without subordinating
aesthetic concerns to social ones.
One of the common elements of the Boom literature, beyond the-
matic concerns, was the presence of multiplicity of genres and discourses
from other disciplines. This polyphony helped construct the “total
literary work” or “total novel.” Aínsa describes this idea, stating that
the “total novel” would end with false scholastic-like dilemmas that
divide Latin American novels into social, sociological, historical, cos-
tumbrista, objective, or ideological genres, each in conflict with the
others, as if all the elements of these novelistic traditions could not
coexist in a simultaneous, contradictory, and enriching form. Carlos
Fuentes calls it the “total novel,” whereas Aínsa asserts that the novel
is a combination of “myth, language and structure” (Narrativa 53).
The emphasis on polyphony and the creation of the “total novel”
are instrumental in portraying a new Latin American society and also
in the construction of a new canon. Combined with the commercial
and critical success of the Boom, these aesthetic elements provided a
benchwater moment for Latin American literature. One could also
argue that the Boom’s aesthetics—which employed magical realism
with the same ease that it used a testimonial approach—already rep-
resented an alteration of the canon, but as Edgar Mora has astutely
observed regarding the study of Latin American literary history: “The
tradition of rupture in Latin America is a question that is not stud-
ied, and because it is not studied, it is too ambiguous and obscure”
(42). Perhaps because of this, the Post-Boom period took the initia-
tive in a much less serious way, and from there it continued its own
production.
Even though some scholars lump everything that followed the
Boom into the category of Post-Boom, a more narrow definition of
Post-Boom is necessary given the variety of texts that fit the broader
definition. In the shadow of writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel
García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes, these Post-Boom
texts imitate magical realism, exploiting it as an easy way to access
the global literary market and with it commercial success.1 The Post-
Boom literature has been criticized as empty, easy literature without
great artistic merits due to its simplistic repetition of the Boom aes-
thetics to create an exotic quality that global readers began to associate
with Latin American authors. Because of these criticisms, at least two
D e ep L i t e r at u r e a n d D i r t y R e a l i s m 87
groups of young Latin American writers rejected the Post-Boom aes-

thetic and presented their own views in manifestos, the first propos-
ing an aesthetic of “dirty realism.”
The first issue of the journal La Pus Moderna (Modern Pus,
1989) provides a series of texts defining dirty realism.2 The emphasis
the journal itself placed on counterculture and postmodernity com-
plements the authors’ proposal for a Mexican dirty realism or “trash
literature.” Consistent with its countercultural roots, the very title of
the magazine was a play on the word “postmodern” in Spanish.3 The
magazine’s title altered the meaning of the original term and moved
it to the realm of the dirty, the insane, the sick, creating a perfect title
that corresponded with the ideology of the publication.
Naief Yehya and Guillermo J. Fadanelli, both of whom were part of
La Pus Moderna’s editorial staff, further the “dirty realist” aesthetic
proposal in two texts, “La literatura a la que estamos condenados”
(The Literature to Which We Are Condemned) and “MoHo, princip-
ios básicos” (MoHo, Basic Principles), also commonly known as the
MoHo manifesto. In “La literatura,” Fadanelli and Yehya state:
We were able to finally find the ideal classification for new Latin
American writers. They can be divided into assholes and intellectu-
als (don’t laugh, it took us a lot of work to arrive at this conclusion).
The intellectuals are influenced by Julio Cortázar and the assholes by
García Márquez . . . Anyway, we raise a definitive cross on Mexican let-
ters’ cadaver and we believe that, as soon as possible, we should get rid
of the body. (Yehya and Fadanelli 36)
For these authors, the “afterlife” of García Márquez’s discourse

becomes the greatest blunder of contemporary literature. According
to Yehya and Fadanelli, within this dead literature there are also
works by old ladies who “instead of helping with Church donations
sat down to write novels whose only attribute is that they have no
sense of the ridiculous” (36).4 Equally problematic, for these authors,
is the presence of class discrimination in some contemporary literary
works in which character development and plot divide “in degrees
and neighborhoods a misery that at first glance seemed to affect
everyone” (36). The MoHo authors frame their political and aes-
thetic position through negative terms, that is, by describing the
type of literature they do not want to create. Imitating derridean dis-
course, in which the margin becomes the center, Yehya and Fadanelli
subvert tradition in favor of their own self-described underground
position: “The magazine MoHo is not a marginal publication; in
fact, outside of us everything is marginal” (50). Furthermore, in the
manifesto, they reject classifications like “disenchantment,” which

tended to belittle countercultural forms of artistic expression. One
finds a more political–philosophical discussion than an aesthetic one;
the MoHo authors challenge the imposed order not only for art, but
also for humanity: “If one were to have to learn a lesson, it would be
that of forgetting everything that has been learned, this whole les-
son of humanity and its achievements” (50). Once again emphasizing
negation rather than creation, the authors also imply a position free
of influence, stating “We do not have a position on man nor a new
vision of humanity” (51). Their literary proposal then comes from
the tension between this spirit of negation and the manipulation of
aesthetics; they argue that:
The creative exercises that man needed to preserve his essence were
confused with mere modes that celebrated the most banal part of the
spirit . . . Words have always been sluts that sell themselves to artists, to
politicians, to speech makers and to prophets. They have been the mas-
turbatory instrument with which we now masturbate without feeling
the least amount of pleasure . . . Everything has been a constant descent
into misery. Through the promise of a better world (a phrase which has
always sweetly bounced between publicity and philosophy) it became
an ignominious and constant present . . . We believe that literature is
dead and furthermore so are writers and thinkers . . . Talking of us is
false because we are simply alone in this eclectic and imitative game, in
this half babbling among the rubble. (Yehya and Fadanelli 36)
Although the quote contains no direct references to contemporary

literary forms, it does manifest dissatisfaction with a system that no
longer functions. In the text, MoHo authors declare that literature
“está pelas,” which implies that literature and its authors are lost.5
While the discourse of these two writers refers to Latin American lit-
erature in particular, at the same time their statements take on much
broader implications. They are arguing that the “official discourse
of humanity” is empty, art has become silent. Thus, literature “está
pelas” (lost), it is unable to go further.
Through the discourse of dirty realism, first proposed in La Pus
Moderna, Lodo focuses on putting crude, dirty reality, and explicit
sexuality at the center of the narration. Diana Palaversich, speaking
of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Trilogía sucia de La Habana (Dirty Trilogy
of La Habana), could just as easily have been referring to Fadanelli’s
novel: “What is revealed as ‘dirty’ . . . is not sex, which many puritani-
cal readers have defined as pornographic . . . by reading between the
lines, what one does see is the dirty everyday reality that the author
magnificently describes without falling into the trap of writing a

political pamphlet” (82). That dirty realism could function as a coun-
tercultural discourse summarizes the basic position of the MoHo
manifesto. In contrast to the great Boom novels, the aesthetic of dirty
realism focuses on the individual as the product of marginalization.
In Lodo, the characters are marginal ones: the university professor
who holds the lowest rank in the academic hierarchy and receives the
lowest salary, or the man approaching fifty with financial problems
and erectile dysfunction who has no business in life other than fol-
lowing his routine. There is also Flor Eduarda, a lower class girl from
the outskirts of Mexico City who works part-time, dead-end jobs, at
places like the Seven Eleven. She is a young girl without any education
past the first years of secondary school and has become accustomed to
using her youth and beauty, as well as her body, to resolve her most
immediate problems. She cannot begin to dream of a future because
she is unable to comprehend the idea. Characters like these face great
difficulty becoming the center of deep novels, that is, novels about
the “great” themes. The literature of dirty realism provides examples
of the individual marginalized by hegemonic discourse.
Fadanelli’s representations of reality take place “in the space gen-
erated between abandonment and persecution [where] creation and
eccentric literature meet and find a balance. In other words, this is an
oblique, marginal, and maladjusted literature which rises from outside
the center” (Aínsa, Del canon 133). Fadanelli employs not just mar-
ginal characters and themes, but the literary style itself is also margin-
alized. “Trash literature” or dirty realism belong to what Deleuze and
Guattari call a minor literature, which “doesn’t come from a minor
language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major
language” (16). Deleuze and Guattari’s definition places trash litera-
ture within a space of confrontation against the literary canon in rela-
tion to its values, themes, development, and even its language. Dirty
realism lacks its own language, because language is developed by the
institutions, through the canon; thus, this literary movement has to
create a brand new language as a variant of the dominant one. Dirty
realism modifies
a language, solemn and held responsible for the past, [and] turns the
grandiloquent tone with which it was believed to be invested into a
mocking and decentralized chronicle . . . into humor, in playful elo-
quence, into the ability for self denigration . . . by a literature which
has lost its solemnity due to its absurd . . . and black humor. (Aínsa,
Narrativa 105)
Thus, through sarcasm, humor, and hyperbolic grotesqueness,

Fadanelli’s novel exalts the language of dirty realism. The narrator,
a university philosophy professor, carries the appropriate background
for his discipline, which includes a disposition toward philosophi-
cal discourse and its corresponding terminology: “How interesting
could the life of an imbecile who writes essays about philosophical
minutiae in order to forswear the company of a beautiful woman be?”
(62). This novel’s discourse acquires a philosophical quality that is
not limited to the use of a word or two related to philosophy, or to
portraying the thoughts of a philosopher in the text. Since the first
person narrator determines the tone, as a result the entire text con-
stantly reverts to the essay form.
The text’s polyphony, achieved through the intertextuality of
quotes ranging from presocratic to postructural thought, enhances
its essay character. The main character, Benito Torrentera, constructs
a discourse in which his philosophical digressions juxtapose the
most abstract concepts with the most practical and ordinary parts
of daily life: “In a somewhat hidden beginning, after the insolence
of a worker, I put my hand under her buttocks to introduce a finger
in her ass. She squirmed lightly letting me handle her with a certain
freedom. She closed her eyes, biting her lip on account of the pain.
If someone would have seen, like I did, her expression of pleasurable
pain they would have understood how it is that there are those who
dare to talk about utopias” (185). These connections vary in their
emphasis between the ordinary—or the “dirty”—and the intellectual
or philosophical. Thus, if the quote above gives more prominence to
the “dirty” side, in the following one philosophical references gain
importance, even if the author seems to be trying to achieve a balance
between the two realms:
I have always envied Kantian discipline. Old Kant was up at five in

the morning ready to carry out a routine that was always the same
until the day he died. He got up to read and to invent transcendental
categories. I get up to clean my fellow prisoners’ shit. Nevertheless,
both acts: cleaning metaphysical excrement through reason or clean-
ing fresh shit with a brush, are equally disturbing activities. (187)
The ideas of Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Plato, and other Western

thinkers connect dirty reality to philosophical thought. Fadanelli
includes reflection, digression, and a first person narrative voice
inherited from the essay tradition. This first person voice has been
used by other Hispanic authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas and Juan
Villoro.6 In Fadanelli’s text, the narrator and what he narrates are

fundamentally incorporated into the essay form, which in turn con-
nects with other subgenres, like the chronicle, the autobiography,
and autofiction. Liliana Weinberg, in talking about the essay’s form,
argues that the boundary between the novel and the essay is nebulous;
characteristics of one are found in the other, allowing for essay-novels
and narrative-essays (211). Furthermore, as Vila-Matas mentions
in Doctor Pasavento (2005): “Perhaps the great invention of Sterne
was the novel built almost entirely of digressions . . . The tangent or
digression, whether one wants it or not, is a perfect strategy to delay
the conclusion” (44). The quote about Kant found in Lodo reveals the
intellectual pretensions of both the novel and the narrator but also
serves to advance the essay characteristics that filters through most of
the novel. Each page of the novel—with its reflections, digressions,
the nonacademic and the academic quote—offers the possibility of
starting a new stage of the essay form.
There is also a metafictional aspect to Fadanelli’s novel: the nar-
rator’s voice is self-referential. He reveals how he puts together the
structure of the novel and even questions the very construction of the
work he realizes. After judging his own work, that is, the adequacy of
the way in which his novel is narrated, he then decides the trajectory
of his work of art:
The following is the story of the Seven Eleven’s robbery. I will not tell
it, nor will Eduarda, who is not capable of writing. I will use a neutral
tone to narrate the strictly necessary events, avoiding useless digres-
sions and observations like those that fill this novel . . . Up to here the
description of the robbery is succinct and free of stylistic insolence.
A style that I have not achieved but rather the style’s killer, embodied in
the worker who, without accent or personal passion, dedicates himself
to stack brick upon brick, to collect trash and sweep away the inconve-
niences of literary avenues. (77)
In contrast to the self-referential aspect of the work, there is also an

imitation of the popular detective novel and its traditional linear nar-
rative. Adding to the polyphony of the text, the author incorporates
forms like a news article that one might find in the tabloids as part
of the detective novel discourse in the text. After all, these pages are
full of the most sordid and dirty forms of reality. The novel, as its
narrator explains, could easily be found in one of these sensationalist
articles: “I read and re-read the most apparently absurd news, I revise
the article trying to imagine to myself the events that reading the
most common news would unleash. An adolescent robs a mini-mart

and escapes with the cashbox. The resolution of the crime sees two
men dead and a philosophy professor in jail. Damn” (311). The most
apparently absurd news forms the basis of an aesthetic that focuses
on individuals. Fadanelli’s story expresses the style at the center of
dirty realism; it portrays the characters the MoHo manifesto theo-
rized. The guidelines Fadanelli and Yeyha proposed in 1989 became
a style focused on stories of individuals, stories traditionally margin-
alized by hegemonic accounts. In portraying the baseness of reality,
this literature looks for the real through the lens of fiction. The real
for them can be understood as “that which fractures reality by put-
ting things in their place” (Badiou 32). Dirty realism’s discourse is
that of a minor literature, in the sense that it is marginalized from
the discourse of the canon. For dirty realism, the individual and his
mundaneness displace the great themes—which interest the Crack
group so much—like the world wars, the millennial discussion about
Creation, and artistic creation.
Six-and-a-half years after the publication of the MoHo manifesto,
in May 1996, the Crack Manifesto appears. As preparation for the
presentation of the manifesto, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Eloy
Urroz, Pedro Ángel Palau, and Ricardo Chávez each wrote a novel
with the same theme: the end of the world. With the help of editor
Sandro Cohen, they presented both the manifesto and the novels on
the same day. Regarding the aesthetic principle of these five works,
Ignacio Padilla remembers that “their proposals, even though they
were extremely personal, coincided astonishingly, and so much so,
that it did not seem risky for us to draft a type of aesthetic position
that, between light-heartedness and solemnity, would lead to a liter-
ary manifesto” (Padilla 21–22). The authors assured an aesthetic link
between novels and the manifesto.
The Crack group coincides with MoHo in its disdain for the empty
magical realism of the Post-Boom. As the Crack Manifesto states: “if
there were some kind of rupture, it would be with the rubbish, with
the pap-to-deceive-the-fool, with the cynically superficial and dis-
honest novel” (Palou, Urroz et al. 4). Even though the topic is treated
delicately, it is important to highlight that this is the only rupture
that, in principle, they recognize. Ten years after the publication of
the manifesto, Padilla remembers: “The followers of Fuentes, García
Márquez, Cortázar, Borges and company had taken literature to a
decline where total or totalizing novels were conspicuous for their
absence . . . That which gives dignity to any literature was missing”
(23). While maintaining continuity with a part of the Latin American
canon, the Crack members impose upon themselves the task of creat-
ing literary texts that they described as totalizing, as the deep litera-
ture of the great themes. In this respect, Alberto Castillo has pointed
out that the Crack’s use of the term “deep” as a category or type of
novel does not follow the definition given by the only person who
had previously used it to talk about literature, and Mexican litera-
ture at that. According to Castillo, critic John S. Brushwood, in his
study, Mexico in Its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity (1996), men-
tions the possibility of creating a “deep” novel, which Brushwood
finds in Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (The Edge of the Storm,
1947). Castillo warns that, “The problem with this term [deep] is
that it is practically impossible to understand it if it is isolated from its
context . . . According to Brushwood, [Yáñez] is able to delve into the
Mexican national predicament and succeeds in expressing the com-
plexity of its problems” (Castillo 86). The Crack’s reformulation of
deep literature is important because it becomes the aesthetic focus of
their novels. What the manifesto expresses about the deep novel cor-
responds to “a tradition or series of novels and novelist writers who, in
their times, ‘profoundly’ understood creative work as the most genu-
ine expression of an artist who was committed to his work” (Palou,
Urroz et al.). For Castillo, however, the Crack aesthetic has com-
pletely changed the original meaning of the term: “The term [deep]
is used in an absolutely distinct mode from that which its author gave
it . . . the tradition of the deep novel that the Crack Manifesto signals
is found to be impossible to track, at least with arguments and defini-
tions that are contained in it” (87). The Crack’s redefinition of deep
literature must be understood as referring to an engaged work: not
necessarily engaged socially or politically, but engaged with itself.
The manifesto explains that the members of the group write novels
with demands and without concessions: “to explore the genre of the
novel with its most complex and solid themes, and its own syntactic,
lexical and stylistic structures; with the necessary polyphony, extrav-
agance and experimentation; with a rigor free from complacencies
and pretexts” (Palou, Urroz et al.). Furthermore, they pretend that
their aesthetic is one of the grotesque, the ridiculous, the extravagant,
and the irregular. An additional aspect of their poetics is the rejec-
tion of constructing stories with chronotopes. Following Mikhail
Bakhtin, they look for a text that corresponds to a zero chronotope,
“the no-place and no-time, all-times and all-places” (Palou, Urroz
et al.).7 Structurally, they aim to combine different genres and avoid
a “pure narrative” mode, while linguistically they reject the use of
slang and local idioms. They avoid transient language because they
are looking for permanency, enduring fame like that of renowned

authors Cervantes and Rabelais.
In the manifesto, they argue that deep literature is all of these ele-
ments unified to produce a novel: “The five Crack novels are exactly
where we have to look for how much of a pact, of a compromised soul
and ambition; how much of a bet on a—let’s call it—‘deep’ literature
are actually in these writers” (Palou, Urroz et al., n.p.). Each of the
general characteristics that are a part of the manifesto can be studied
as poetic guides for the Crack novels, since the relationship of the fic-
tional texts to the manifesto is an aspect that has not been sufficiently
questioned. It would also be interesting to explore other connections
between the Crack and Mexican literary history. For example, there
is a similarity between the Contemporáneos and the Crack group
through both their affiliation to a cosmopolitan viewpoint and a pen-
chant for performance in the public sector of culture and politics.8
More important for the present study, however, is to compare the
Crack to MoHo and Fadanelli’s Lodo in order to see the negotia-
tions among literary system, aesthetic, literary tradition, and canon
through the correspondence between text and manifesto.
One can read Jorge Volpi’s novel, El temperamento melancólico as
an example of the aesthetic of deep literature in relation to the views
expressed in the Crack Manifesto. This novel tells of a film direc-
tor, Carl Gustav Gruber, who knows that he will soon die of cancer.
The novel recounts Gruber’s efforts to film his last work; it narrates
each of the steps in preparation for filming—the casting sessions, the
meetings on location, the way in which each of the actors takes charge
of their part. Because the director seeks complete realism in his film,
there is no well-defined script for the actors. Instead, the film seeks
realism born of spontaneity. Finally, the second half of the novel pres-
ents the difficulties that arise simultaneously in the world of the film,
the real world, and the complex personal relationships between the
actors. These difficulties are captured by the lens, where the manipu-
lation of the director and the interaction of the actors also affect the
plot of the film.
By focusing on artistic creation, Volpi highlights what the Crack
authors maintained, that their interest in the novel went beyond any
expression that had to do with conventional themes, like daily life,
and, of course, Mexican culture. On this point, they pretend to estab-
lish a break with the Boom and with a literature that they do esteem,
like the works of Fernando del Paso and Carlos Fuentes. This distanc-
ing has to do with their lack of interest in writing about national
topics and about everyday reality. While in Fernando del Paso’s José
Trigo (1966) one sees the search for what the author—like Volpi much
later—calls the “total novel,” in the case of Del Paso’s novel, the story
narrates the life of a rail worker who the author employs to put into
play the complete history of Mexico. In contrast, in Volpi’s work, the
narration’s thematic possibilities are limited as he is only interested in
constructing his text around what he calls the “great themes.” Two
great themes are intertwined in El temperamento melancólico. On the
one hand, it portrays the ability to produce the best work of art in a
specific field (cinema); on the other hand, it plays with the fictional
and metafictional idea of ending the world the artist has created.
Both themes are united through the creator of the great work of
art who positions himself above any others. The narration plays with
the interrelated ideas of creation and destruction; just as the creator
gives life to a fictional world, he can destroy it. The characters’ voices,
especially Renata, the narrator, repeatedly stress the same idea: the
film would be “The culmination not only of German film, but of film
itself” (53), “The film that would be the culmination of the history
of film” (56), “We prepared to finish the history of film” (62), and
“that film in which we were trapped was the culmination of the his-
tory of film” (292).
Another of the aesthetic notions that works against the Crack’s
project of achieving the total novel is the difficulty of employing
Bakhtin’s chronotope zero.9 The Boom authors, such as Fuentes or
Del Paso, identified with the nation. Perhaps their novels were not a
demagogic discourse about Mexican identity, but the nation was the
center of their fictional worlds. With characters like Del Paso’s José
Trigo, or Fuentes’s Ixca Cienfuegos—from La región más transpar-
ente (Where the Air is Clear, 1958)—the Mexican novels of the 1960s
and 1970s explored the human experience and its great themes, and
the authors had no need to impose limitations regarding time and cul-
ture. However, it would seem that the Crack novels—among them Si
volviesen sus majestades (If Their Majesties Return, 1996), El tempera-
mento melancólico, and En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor,
1999), to mention some of the most popular and best known ones—
have understood the chronotope zero as a negation of the national.
Despite the fact that El temperamento melancólico takes place in the
Mexican city of Pachuca and in Mexico City, and even though its
characters are predominantly Mexicans, Carl Gustav Gruber comes
from German origins. In the novel, Gruber is presented as a demiurge
of himself and of art, of the fictional world that he inhabits and the
fictional worlds he creates; he can influence the other characters and
thus affect how they act in the film. The German director, his career,
his artistic enterprise, his grand objective, all have nothing to do with
Mexico; the country and the nationality of the characters are merely
circumstantial. Volpi could easily change the country in which the
novel takes place and nothing else would be altered because the novel
has decentered any sense of the nation.
The business of distancing fiction from nationality is reaffirmed
through the neutral languages employed, under the cover of a natu-
ral language. Volpi is coherent in creating a possible world of fic-
tion where, as the group’s manifesto proposes, language at no point
regresses to slang, folklore, or a generational tone. This characteristic
clearly distances the Crack group from others like the Onda, which
expressed a countercultural ideology and linguistic register of the
1960s and 1970s in which slang, neologisms, references to popular
culture, and to specific geographical places and historical moments
indicate the existence of a chronotope.
Of course, the construction of novels with chronotope zero is
close to impossible; science fiction texts create their own chronotope,
which is typically a construct launched from the present. In El tem-
peramento melancólico, the chronotope is Mexico in the 1990s, while
En busca de Klingsor uses Germany in the 1940s, close to the end
of the Second World War. It becomes clear that what the manifesto
expressed as a desire to reach the chronotrope zero is actually a rejec-
tion of any chronotope that refers to popular or Mexican culture. In
both El temperamento melancólico and En busca de Klingsor, Volpi is
not creating a space, nor a geography, free of interferences but is con-
structing a fictional city of Pachuca and a fictional Germany that are
still related to the Pachuca and Germany of the real world. Following
the ideas of Lubromior Doležel, fictionality generates historical rec-
reations of people or places that function in a new way through trans-
formation (43). Despite the fact that the author attempts to establish
distance between his narrative space and the verifiable, real space,
what the author puts into place is a possible world of fiction. This
world has been given chronotropic elements by virtue of sharing the
proper noun with a real referent. The novel maintains references to
“time, space and society (order, mentalities and culture)” (Beristáin
117). Thus, it helps to separate the interior chronotrope, that of the
fictional world, and the exterior chronotrope, that of the real world.
Fictionality installs an autonomous possible world that is governed by
its own rules and formed by the textuality of the work, which implies
the presence of an interior chronotrope regardless of its proximity to
the exterior chronotrope (Doležel 32). Volpi does not separate these
chronotopes, but rather allows them to relate to each other. At the
same time, the interior chronotrope constitutes a nonrepresentation

of Mexico, to thus avoid any nationalist characteristics. The time and
space that shape the possible fictional world do not matter for their
chronotopic construction. What does matter is the eschatological
aspect of the narration, the devaluation of the present that is replaced
by the importance of the future, which also implies an “[end] of this
life and ‘advent of the kingdom of God,’ ‘twilight of the gods,’ catas-
trophe and new chaos, or, in the end, an ‘afterlife’—a notion that ide-
alizes principles and values in an atemporal and eternal plane to satisfy
human hunger for transcendence—where the fulfillment of desire is
located” (Beristáin 120). Beristáin’s eschatological description, based
on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory, sheds light on the type of relationship
between time and space present in El temperamento melancólico. The
devaluation of the present in Volpi’s novel is complemented by the
themes of the fictional world and the metafictionality of the novel.
According to Bakhtin, choosing a chronotope is not as simple as
deciding on aesthetic form but also an ideological gesture: “the chro-
notope should correspond to the structural elements of the text, but
essentially have to be a characteristic of the worldview” (Beristáin 18).
Volpi’s negation of the chronotope through the eschatological tech-
nique implies a negation of the ties with a nation and a national way
of life. Thus, the depiction of the fictionalized Pachuca in the novel
does not imply a larger dialogue with Mexican culture.
Besides the approximation to a chronotrope zero, the novel also
incorporates the essay’s discursive tradition as a form that allows
narration as well as the use of textual polyphony. El temperamento
melancólico constructs the essay through the incorporation of dif-
ferent discourses and registers that allow for a multiplicity of voices.
This articulation of multidiscursivity and polyphony in the novel fol-
lows a tradition that comes from some of the Boom works. Jacques
Leenhardt, for example, has highlighted the intermingling of the
essay and the novel in the case of one of the best known novels of the
Boom, Augusto Roa Bastos’ Yo, el supremo (I, the Supreme, 1974).
For Leenhardt, this discursive technique is more than a simple experi-
mental exercise; the tendency to incorporate the essay in the novel is
also a search for coherency:
[The incorporation of the essay form] places the ethical motivation at

the center. Following the sense in which it was understood in the eigh-
teenth century, the essayist is a moralist, but this ethical aspiration of
the essay is never sufficiently strong enough to overshadow the impor-
tance that its artistic aspect . . . The essay requires a different reader
from that which is envisioned by numerous contemporary authors,

every time they resort to an active reader who has to complete, perfect
and determine an “open” text. (Leenhardt 134–135)
According to Leenhardt, then, the text uses a narrative strategy that

orients itself toward an active moralist stance with the aim of coercing
the readers, who are obliged to react to what they read. This was pres-
ent in the Crack Manifesto; they wanted to produce a complex novel
that would not give concessions to the reader and would provoke
their participation in the construction of the text. The information
supplied through diverse nonnarrative discourses will enable the syn-
thesis of this information to allow readers to form their own opinions.
For example, documents corresponding to the description of a charac-
ter’s life and psychology exist, but there is no voice that interprets the
presence of these documents, all of which are fictitious, but should
be read as real within the fictional world. The narrative inserts other
texts like a newspaper interview, which had been published twenty
years before, without explaining its presence; it merely appears. In
addition, the author has included a detailed section with the tone of
a literary essay, which describes different temperaments, among them
melancholy: “Greek theory recognizes four humors: blood, phlegm,
yellow bile and black bile . . . Why is it that the ones which have stood
out in philosophy, politics, poetry and the arts were manifestly mel-
ancholic? . . . Art became a profane instrument to achieve salvation,
transcendence” (Volpi 153–156). This is one of the nonnarrative texts
that support the theme of Volpi’s narrative work. Rather than but-
tressing by repetition of the leitmotiv, the inclusion of the theory of
humors grafts the essay into the main story’s argument. The same can
be said of other insertions, like the appearance of entries in the per-
sonal notebook of director Gruber. The essay discourse in the novel is
also composed through direct essay fragments incorporated into the
text as well as other narrative fragments, like the narrator’s personal
reflections, which exhibit the essay’s style.10
However, all the artistic projects described in the novel remain unre-
alized at the end. The work does not become a masterpiece, nor does
Carl Gustav Gruber create the great film that will put an end to cin-
ematography, nor does the character in the film, the painter Zacarías,
finish the great painting that would create a crisis of continuity in the
history of painting. The “end,” in which art replaces life, is not achieved.
In effect, everything ends with the narration, Volpi’s novel, Gruber’s
film, and Zacarías’s painting all end; the narrative end of the world has
occurred without achieving a substitution of art for life.
The psychological aspect of Volpi’s novel, seen through the char-

acters’ reflections, enhances the metanarrative discourse within the
novel. Theoretically, as the characters’ thoughts develop and change
through their participation in the process of cinematic immersion,
their actions should also be altered. The process of character devel-
opment is only possible in the novel through the mediation of the
narrator. Renata affirms that: “Irrationality had invaded us: our
movements could not be judged by the logic of normality” (192)
and “art had replaced reality. Life and what was natural had ceased
to exist, now the only possible world, our only universe was that
of the film” (274). These statements say what happens intellectu-
ally for the characters. However, in spite of the narrator’s insistence,
the psychological manipulation of the characters has not affected
their behavior, only their intellect. After each scene in the novel has
been filmed, the characters return to who they were previously. In
front of the camera they can complete actions motivated by an out-
side impulse, but on finishing the scenes of the film, they return to
themselves. By placing the filming of a movie within the novel, the
author employs the fiction-within-a fiction construction character-
istic of the contemporary novel. However, Volpi does not exploit all
the possibilities of this metafictional structure. There is no attempt
at making the characters confront their own fictional nature. Here,
the novel’s characters know they are fictional, but only regarding the
film in which they are acting. The self-awareness of metafictional
texts, which is sometimes employed with the purpose of suggesting
that there is a fictional aspect of the readers’ real world, is completely
absent in Volpi’s novel.
As observed in El temperament melancólico, the Crack literature
continues to use some of the narrative forms established by the Boom
novels, like polyphony, the total novel, and the inclusion of the essay.
However, this “total” novel rejects a discourse of nationality; the
“great” themes that it addresses do not focus on the world of daily
life, but rather reflect on “great” moments in the history of human-
ity. Aínsa has commented on the abandonment of a totalizing aes-
thetic that occurred at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the
1980s: “In contrast to novels that attempted to be true summas of
existential or phenomenological experience, recent fiction has appar-
ently much more modest aspirations” (Narrativa 104). Unlike the
Crack group, which sought to return to these total novels, but to
do so in a way that altered the original proposal of the Boom, other
contemporary texts are looking to de-mythify the canonization of
that type of novel. Aínsa explains that this will happen by “declaring
open parricide with the arms of ridicule, humor, irony, parody and
the grotesque. The intense revisionism announces, at the same time,
an opening to a world free of prejudices” (104). Mexican dirty reality
belongs to this reformulation of literature with an open rejection of
the Latin American literary canon.
As part of this renovating project, both Jorge Volpi’s and Guillermo
Fadanelli’s novels have found acceptance in the global market. With
translations into various languages, their works reach a public that the
generation before the Boom could never have imagined. They also
reach the same public that they criticize for creating the stigma of
easy magical realism. In contrast to this overworked technique, one
of the characteristics that both aesthetics share is the use of essay ele-
ments in their narrative. Antonio Wienrichter’s statement that works
become essays because they do not seek to represent the world but
to reflect upon it, together with the inclusion of a recognizable voice
that implies the incorporation of “a mix of materials and heterogenous
resources” (13), seems appropriate regarding these two authors. For
both of them, reflection, both of the world and of the self, is of the
utmost importance. Thus, the characters and the narrative voices are
fundamentally those of the essay, incorporating aspects of the cultured
quote and making their discourse an intellectual one. Although Lodo’s
protagonist is a philosophy professor who is involved in the practices of
his profession, the relation to the essay also implies self-reflection and
from this position contrasts with the sophisticated texts of philosophy
and culture in general. In Volpi’s novel, this reflection can be seen
from the very title, El temperamento melancólico, which the narrator
explains is his way of being distant from the action, passive but reflec-
tive. The narrator devoid of personality incorporates all of the encyclo-
pedic cultured discourses to construct the world of the protagonists.
At the same time, the text questions this way of constructing and
destroying the fictional world with an ending that is disastrous for
both the film and the characters. The incorporation of the essay in
these two novels and in Latin American narrative in general can be
seen as part of a contemporary aesthetic. As Castillo Puche suggests,
“what [other critics] call essay, I call interiorizing, investigation, explo-
ration within, human and anthropological exploration. I believe this is
the path of the present novel (the contemporary novel)” (76). Without
a doubt, the expression of the essay form by Lodo’s protagonist is the
most disconcerting. He constructs his reflection about himself and his
world in references and quotes that contrast with the dirty realism of
the novel. This shock, or heresy, conforms to what Adorno states, that
“the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy” (23). In contrast, the essay
tone of Volpi’s novel fits with the cultural project of the film director,
which takes the characters’ lives through the spiral of his uncommon
artistic project.
If this vision of the essay and the aesthetic positions of these
groups are at times irreconcilable, this does not signal any weak-
ness in contemporary Latin American literature. It is true that Jorge
Volpi declared, “Latin American literature no longer exists” (see
“Literatura”), an idea also expressed in the MoHo manifesto: “We
believe that literature is lost” (36). However, if Fadanelli’s and Volpi’s
assertions are true, what is the sense in calling this chapter an explo-
ration of recent Latin American and Mexican literature? Is it possible
to talk of conserving and subverting a canon of something that no
longer exists? And yet, in answer to these questions, both groups,
MoHo and the Crack, maintain those elements that made the Latin
American canon “explode.” In order to preserve these aspects, they
have decided to take different aesthetic paths after a journey of more
than a century of conformity and change in the Latin American liter-
ary tradition.
Notes
1. In speaking of the Post-Boom, I will refer specifically to a few texts
from the end of the 1970s and a large number of works produced
during the 1980s.
2. The first edition of La Pus Moderna corresponds to the months of
November and December, 1989.
3. Pus moderno sounds like “posmoderno” or postmodern in Spanish.
4. The identity of “these women” is unclear; the text itself does not give
names. One can deduce, however, that they are referring to authors
like Isabel Allende, Guadalupe Loaeza, and Laura Esquivel.
5. Colloquially in Mexico the term “pelar” means to lose a game.
6. Vila-Matas’s texts, like Recuerdos inventados (Imagined Memories,
1994), combine essays, chronicles, and stories. Regarding Villoro’s
collection of essays De eso se trata (That’s the Real Point, 2008),
Christopher Domínguez Michael comments that, “In Villoro even a
collection of essays encompasses the realization of a narrative mecha-
nism” (58).
7. It is important to recognize what the concept of chronotrope zero
implies for Ignacio Padilla: “[chronotope zeros are] autonomous
worlds, they are not supposed to foreshadow anything nor to symbol-
ize anything” (Noguerol 28). Padilla also describes the chronotope
zero as “the no-place and the no-time, all the times and places and
none of them” (Chávez et al., Crack 219). Following Bakhtin, the
chronotrope is “(literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness
of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed
in literature” (84). The individual characteristics of certain works

reveal their spatial and temporal position and, because of that, one
can determine their specific sociocultural moment. Helena Beristáin
suggests a way of understanding the chronotrope: “In artistic dis-
course temporal, spatial and social indicators are fused together . . . it
is capable of capturing a space, a given zone together with its his-
torical/cultural content in a way that it obtains from that zone a
historical/geographic characterization” (118–119). Considering this
definition, one can understand chronotrope zero as simply the liter-
ary effort to distance oneself from this historical/geographic catego-
rization. For the Crack authors themselves, narrative in chronotrope
zero is that which seeks to free itself of the limits of a time and space,
so that the importance of its historical context is diminished.
8. The Contemporáneos were a group of Mexican writers and intellectu-
als from the first half of the twentieth century who joined in the pub-
lication of a journal of the same name from 1928 to 1931. Attracted
to the European avant-garde movements, the group consisted of
Xavier Villaurrutia, Jorge Cuesta, José Gorostiza, Gilberto Owen,
and Carlos Pellicer. They focused on freeing themselves from the ties
to regional and national discourses connected to Mexican identity.
They opted for a literature that they defined as cosmopolitan.
9. Examples of the “total novel” are Terra Nostra (1975) and La región
más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear, 1958) by Carlos Fuentes
or Mario Vargas Llosas’a Conversación en la catedral (Conversation
in the Cathedral, 1969). Other examples are Palinuro de Mexico
(Palinuro of Mexico, 1977) and Noticias del imperio (News from the
Empire, 1987) by Fernando del Paso.
10. In the novel there is also a discourse that does not imitate the essay,
but only narrates, and which contributes to the text’s polyphony. This
voice, which is different from any previous one, and narrates without
taking part in the story, describes in real time the parts of the movie as
they are filmed, thus employing a cinematic discourse. The linguistic
use of the present perfect coincides with the cinematic script, which
appends a brief description of the scene that has just been filmed.
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al espacio del texto. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2003.
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Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas
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Beristáin, Helena. Diccionario de retórica y poética. Mexico: Porrúa, 2000.

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Libros, 1998.
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2008: 58–59.
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Moderna. 1 (1998): 50–51.
Chapter 5
The Historical and Geographical

Imagination in Recent Argentine
Fiction: Rodrigo Fresán and
the DNA of a Globalized Writer
Emilse B. Hidalgo
I n “Aesthetic Moments of Latin Americanism,” Néstor García

Canclini historicizes the changes in Latin American art by identify-
ing three aesthetic moments in the past few decades: a first moment,
in the 1960s, when some Latin American texts—the so-called Latin
American Boom—functioned as “a herald of utopia,” suggesting the
possibility of social change. In the 1980s and 1990s, “a memory of
the defeat” reigned over the second moment as fiction persisted in
“evoking the dead and the losses, the exiles and the hopelessness”
(“Aesthetic” 13). The third moment, beginning with the twenty-first
century, is characterized by the “immediateness of the present” (13).
British critics such as Gerald Martin, Donald Shaw, and Philip
Swanson have made other attempts at periodization, focusing on a
distinction between the period of the Boom, roughly between the
1950s and 1970s, and the Post-Boom novels, which appeared after
the late 1970s. If we follow García Canclini’s account, however,
the Boom period is only a phase or moment in contemporary Latin
American literary history and, therefore, should not be taken as the
most important one or as a foundational period for the Latin American
narrative. Unfortunately, many critics in Europe or the United States
have privileged the Boom era, which simply underscores the limita-
tions of a global point of view that turns the Boom writers’ magical
realism into the defining characteristic of Latin American fiction,
turning the latter into a unique, exotic product, different from what
they have at home.
106 E m i l s e B . H i d a lg o
In the 1960s, explains García Canclini, “the issue of what was

Latin America was reformulated from the internationalizing pro
jects and the vanguards that redesigned artistic and literary fields”
(“Aesthetic” 14). In the literary field, the innovations in technique—
such as the multiple disruptions of linear time, the blurring of the
division between high and low culture, and the challenging of canon-
ical definitions of the short-story and the novel genres—were com-
bined, in many cases, with an interest in the utopian insurrectionist
movements that had sprung up either in the writers’ own countries or
in other Latin American nations.
In Argentina, the renewal of the cultural languages became asso-
ciated with economic modernization, creating an alliance between
artistic innovation and the internationalization of culture. Various
institutions, like the Di Tella foundation in Buenos Aires, sponsored
the new vanguard artists and critics who during the 1950s and 1960s
traveled to the international artistic centers—mostly to New York and
Paris—in search of recognition and fame. One case in point is Julio
Cortázar who incorporated into Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) and El
libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel, 1973) many of the experi-
mental techniques of avant-garde fictions while at the same time call-
ing himself a supporter the Cuban Revolution, Allende’s Chile, and
the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The particular conjuncture that
made these literary-political practices possible was the cultural cross-
ing between a national or Latin American process of modernization
and the renewal of cultural languages resulting from the impact of
international revolutionary movements (see García Canclini, “Hybrid
Cultures” and “Aesthetic”).
By the end of the 1960s, however, the national revolutionary pro
jects in the subcontinent ended up in state terrorism and dictatorship
while the metropolitan uprisings were quelled in the 1968 violent
repressions of students’ and workers’ riots (Best and Kellner 17–23;
Harvey 38). The exaltation of the revolutionary promises of the 1960s
gradually gave way to the political repression of the 1970s. After the
1964 coup in Brazil, other military interventions in Argentina, Chile
and Uruguay followed. In many cases, the extermination not only
of the Left but also of any kind of oppositional political action con-
sidered rebellious or subversive meant that many artists and cultural
agents became exiled, and remained so for most of the 1970s. By
the 1980s, democratic conditions were gradually restored to those
Latin American countries and the truth about the human rights vio-
lations of the dictatorships became publicly known. The frustration,
pain, and bereavement felt at the loss of family members, friends, and
I m ag i n at i o n i n R e c en t Ar g en t i n e F i c t i o n 107
colleagues, and the legal impunity granted to those responsible gave

rise to the aesthetic of mourning, memory, and defeat of the 1980s
and 1990s (see García Canclini, “Aesthetic”; Avelar). During that
decade many artists responded to the events of the 1970s in one of
two ways. Either they created art, literature, and film that spoke of
the disappearances, tortures, and deaths or they approached history
as an allegory or as absurd tragicomedy (García Canclini, “Aesthetic”
16). In Argentine literature, for instance, some writers resorted to
farce, irony, and absurdity to portray the Malvinas/Falklands War as
a grotesque fight with no real victories or heroes. Rodolfo Fogwill’s
Los pichy-cyegos (The Armadillos, 1983), Rodrigo Fresán’s Historia
argentina (Argentine Story/History, 1991), and Carlos Gamerro’s
Las islas (The Islands, 1998) are three of the most illustrative exam-
ples of this absurdist dimension within the aesthetic of mourning
and defeat, which, as García Canclini defines it, “simultaneously plays
with both the dramatic and the farcical” (“Aesthetic” 17).
García Canclini’s third moment of Latin Americanism is defined
in very general terms as “the aesthetic of the instant”—that is, con-
cerned only with the eternity of the present. However, to define the
“aesthetic of the instant,” García Canclini shifts the focus of his
analysis from literature to the plastic/performative arts. An obvi-
ous question then emerges: What has happened to literature in this
third moment? This shift in media—from literature to visual art—
in García Canclini’s argument suggests that the conceptualization of
the third moment has proved quite elusive. In the context of Latin
American literary history, for example, Gerald Martin, Donald Shaw,
and Philip Swanson have preferred to speak of the Post-Boom fic-
tion that Chileans Isabel Allende and Antonio Skármeta, Argentine
Luisa Valenzuela, Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré, and Mexican Gustavo
Sainz have created. Their novels are characterized by the three P’s of
Post-Boom narratives: parody, poetry, and pop (Shaw 17). While the
Post-Boom criteria for analysis from this perspective is extremely use-
ful when considering fiction from several Latin American countries
all at once, it is less convincing when dealing with nation-specific
narratives.
The 1980s in Argentina saw a clear shift in the literary canon from
a combative or revolutionary 1970s aesthetic that subordinated lit-
erature to politics, to a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and pluralistic
aesthetic centred on Borges. Parody, quotation, irony, paradox, inter-
textuality, and apocryphal texts became the preferred modes of an
increasingly postmodern writing. It was only in the late 1980s that new
names such as Guillermo Saavedra, Daniel Guebel, Luis Chitarroni,
Alan Pauls, Sergio Chejfec, Matilde Sánchez, Juan Forn, Guillermo

Saccomanno, Marcelo Figueras, and Rodrigo Fresán emerged.
In addition to history and politics, the representation of space
also determines to a very high degree the imaginary coordinates
of the Argentine nation. Argentine fiction has shown from its very
beginnings a contradictory tendency to root its narratives in the
nation, and, at the same time, to make itself more cosmopolitan and
European so as to avoid any regionalism based on local color or a
false sense of the autochthonous. This break with any regionalism
began with the Romantic movement in the late nineteenth century,
at a time when Argentina was launching its first mass-scale European
immigration plan, and continued with the modernista movement
early in the twentieth century when the processes of urbanization and
industrialization were well under way. In fact, the Romantic period
is usually seen as the starting point for geographical tension in the
Argentine imaginary. On the one hand, gauchesco poetry, the nativ-
ist or indigenist novel, and the novel of local customs and manners
becomes legitimized as a reflection of real “Argentinean” culture.
On the other, cosmopolitan writers like Jorge Luis Borges and the
Sur literary magazine writers adapt European and North American
modernist modes of writing to local themes or settings thus pulling
in the opposite direction.
A decisive step in the reformulation of regionalism took place
mostly in the first half of the twentieth century as the geographical
imagination became situated, once and for all, in the big cities and the
European metropolises. Modernity—technological, industrial, edu-
cational, and cultural—brought about a more universal dimension
to the depiction of the landscape henceforth much less impregnated
with local color and with the picturesque than other Latin American
countries. Nowhere was this transformation better expressed than in
Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (The
Argentine Writer and Tradition), where he argued that the idea that
Argentine writing should abound in differential Argentine traits and
Argentine local color was mistaken. Borges’s argument is well known:
the gauchesco poetry of the Martín Fierro that Leopoldo Lugones
and Ricardo Rojas canonized should not be considered the authentic
voice of the gauchos. Rather one should view gauchesco poetry as a
poetic genre like any other, which sometimes takes as its subject mat-
ter the life of the gaucho and at other times is concerned with great
philosophical and universal issues such as time, space, death, memory,
courage, and so on. The fact that the poem imitates a local voice or
is sung from the gaucho’s point of view of does not make the poem
any less artificially contrived than an English poem or Shakespearean

play that deals with Greek or Latin themes. Borges’s essays, “The
Argentine Writer and Tradition” and “Kafka and his Precursors,”
both convey an optimistic view of cosmopolitanism that stands in
opposition to a false criollismo or a narrow-minded regionalism or
nationalism. Borges’s arguments, however, have often been misinter-
preted as justifying the idea that a writer can handle any theme with
total legitimacy, a position that is quite controversial. Here the risks
of superficiality and shallowness are enormous. The debate becomes
particularly complex when one considers fictions that attempt to write
realist accounts of social realities or historical experiences that are
completely foreign to the writer. In other words, to imply that a writer
can write about any theme and that literature is a universal tradition
does not, in this view, amount to saying that anything goes.
In the 1990s, the geographical imagination underwent yet another
transformation as the forces of globalization began to impact upon
the new generation of writers, that is, those born after 1960. Rodrigo
Fresán is of particular interest among this group because he illustrates
the modes that writing the task of mourning took at a time when
the forces of globalization became impossible to ignore. During this
period, film, music, and other popular and mass-mediated forms of
culture renewed the symbolic imaginaries that were incorporated into
works of literature. Daniel Guebel, Juan Forn, Alan Pauls, Matilde
Sánchez, Martín Caparrós, and César Aira, together with Fresán,
belong to the so-called new generation of young writers (Kurlat Ares;
Mora). Born during or after the 1960s, these writers became acutely
aware of the postmodern splintering of the subject, the loss of a teleo-
logical centre, the end of national history and, in some cases, the
abandonment of a socially or politically committed literature as the
Boom writers understood it (Kurlat Ares).
In addition, these writers have, in different ways, explicitly dis-
tanced themselves from the Boom’s magical realism as a mode of
writing and have incorporated in the very structure of their writing
the renewal of cultural languages that García Canclini identifies for
Latin America at large. This has meant the incorporation of a hetero-
geneous symbolic imaginary that mixes the local with the foreign,
the national with the transnational, the popular with high culture,
and the traditional with the contemporary and the postmodern. In
interviews and book presentations, for instance, Rodrigo Fresán has
often stated that he does not write magic realist novels. In the context
of Argentina’s literary tradition, however, it makes little or no sense
to stake such a claim since Argentina has never developed a magic
realist tradition. It has developed a strong tradition in the fantas-

tic genre and in science fiction—Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar,
Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Horacio Quiroga are a case in point—but
magical realism has never been part of its canon or repertoire. What,
then, is the ultimate aim of such statements if not to position the
writer in the global market? The “I am-not-a-magic realist” state-
ment is aimed at the way great publishing conglomerates cater to
what is commonly conceived to be the prescribed specific difference
of Latin American writing—magical realism. Although as Mora and
Kurlat Ares argue, the new Argentine writers do not systematically
share a literary agenda—with the notable exception of Juan Forn
and Rodrigo Fresán who contributed short stories for the publish-
ing project known as McOndo—these writers have tended to reject
beforehand any local color or nativist representation of a rural Latin
America that the international market demands.
What is more, Daniel Guebel, Juan Forn, and Rodrigo Fresán
incorporate the Argentine and Latin American literary tradition in
their works either through stylistic parody or by paying homage or
tribute to the “great masters,” especially to Borges, Cortázar, and
Manuel Puig, but also to Juan Rulfo and Roberto Bolaño and North
American writers like Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, and
Thomas Pynchon. Guebel and Fresán, for example, have both writ-
ten stories in which the Malvinas/Falklands conflict is approached
with a satirical sense of humor in a devastating critique of national
jingoism: Fresán’s “La soberanía nacional” (National Sovereignty),
included in Historia argentina, is a paradigmatic example. In addi-
tion, foreign, usually American, writers like Francis Scott Fitzgerald,
J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, and Raymond Cheever have been the
explicitly acknowledged influences in their stories and novels, so that
instead of legitimizing their writing through a Latin American style
that the market links to magical realism, they consciously claim a
hybrid North American–Latin American–Argentine tradition. It is
this contradictory adaptation to international market demands that
puts Fresán’s writing in an in-between, schizophrenic position in
which he needs to be different enough from American and European
writers to be listed as a Latin American master, while at the same
time, not too Latin American to pass for yet another regionalist,
magic realist, or the Boom writer.
Stylistically, contemporary new or pop writers like Fresán employ
films and music, which provide new symbolic referents that some-
times structure the narratives. A case in point is Fresán’s short story
“El aprendiz de brujo” (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), included in
Historia argentina, where the film Fantasia and the cartoon character
Mickey Mouse are reworked as complex farcical allegories for power
relations in the Malvinas/Falklands conflict. Also, Fresán’s novels
Vidas de santos (Saint’s Lives, 1993), Trabajos manuales (Manual
Labor, 1994), Esperanto (1995/7), and La velocidad de las cosas (The
Speed of Things, 1998) have all continued in the same postgeneric or
experimental vein of Historia argentina. They have proved increas-
ingly difficult to classify not only in terms of the traditional novel and
short-story genres, but also in their mixing of discourses and generic
conventions that range from the speculative essay, metafictional self-
reflexivity and textual self-recycling, biography and autobiography,
to the historical chronicle and the language of journalism. Fresán
employs narrative digressions, ramifications, and sudden or unex-
pected turns in addition to textual and generic hybridity. However,
Fresán’s later works increasingly evince a tendency toward a purely
textual and apolitical cosmopolitanism.
Rodrigo Fresán’s novels also allow us to observe in one and the
same writer a progressive shift from the historically and geographically
rooted postdictatorial stories of Historia argentina to the increasingly
deterritorialized but also more increasingly cosmopolitan and hollow
narratives of his latter books. In his most recent texts, the bricolage
between low, high, and mass media forms of culture has lost to a
large extent its radical potential for critique and has become little
more than mere entertainment. Also, Fresán’s participation in the
McOndo debate over Latin American identity provides ample mate-
rial to explore the reformulations of Latin American and Argentine
identity from a globalization perspective. It has become obvious
at this point to say that the globalization debates have become as
unavoidable as the postmodern debates were in the 1980s and early
1990s. In fact, from the 1990s onward, it is possible to trace in some
of the new Argentine narratives a tendency to narrate the dissolution
of national space through the processes of globalization. One can
notice in new texts a deterritorialization of national space that aban-
dons locality in order to embark on endless journeys, traveling experi-
ences, and an overall nomadism, including, figuratively, a nomadism
of the narrative voice. The impulse to leave, travel, and move away
from Argentina not only refers to traveling abroad, but also to a
restless and temporary reterritorialization of the nomadic narrators
in cities, hotels, malls, highways, and other “non-places” of global
modernity that replace the previously meaning-laden and “fixed”
national space (Augé). Moreover, this movement toward a deterri-
torialized geographical imagination has found cultural expression in
other countries of Latin America as the McOndo debate has shown.

In the cultures of the metropolitan centers—for example, United
States and Britain—deterritorialized narratives have emerged in close
association with a related social phenomenon: a rising interest in cos-
mopolitanism and exile as seen in the cultural works of international
writers like W. G. Sebald, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro, for
example (Beck and Sznaider; Walkowitz).
Similarly, Rodrigo Fresán’s fictions seek increasingly to escape
trauma through a more deterritorialized, cosmopolitan narrative and
find it utterly impossible and useless to believe in the rebirth of a col-
lective project. In fact, in Fresán’s writing, cultural hybridity becomes
completely depoliticized and his deterritorialization eventually implies
a total abandonment of the nation as the imaginary site of a collective
political project with no other European or Western cosmopolitan
plan to replace it.
The cultural productions created in Argentina in the aftermath of
the dictatorship confronted the need to come to terms with past catas-
trophes like the disappearances of political dissidents. The reworking
of a collective past with a special focus on trauma became a transna-
tional tendency in Western societies in the 1980s and 1990s as cul-
tural theorist Andreas Huyssen has argued (2003). Issues of memory
and forgetting emerged as dominant concerns in postcommunist
countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; in Rwanda
and Nigeria and in post-apartheid South Africa with its Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, and in Australia around the issue of the
“stolen generation.”1 Similar concerns weighed heavily in the rela-
tionship between Japan, China, and Korea where memory and trauma
lead the debates on the violations of human rights during the mili-
tary repressions and interventions, as it happened in Argentina, Chile,
and other Latin American nations such as Nicaragua, Guatemala, and
Peru. For Andreas Huyssen (Present Pasts), the Holocaust, in particu-
lar, became a universal trope for genocide and unspeakable horror as
several museums, films, and memorials were created in Europe and
the United States.
In the particular case of Argentina, the kind of memorializing
that the reader encounters in Rodrigo Fresán’s collection of inter-
locking short stories, Historia argentina, is differently inflected from
Holocaust narratives. Neither the dictatorship, nor the Malvinas/
Falklands War, yielded any heroes or martyrs through which national
pride could be reasserted. Both conflicts are represented in Fresán’s
short story collection as absurd, cruel, and murderous. Death and
war are seen as the result of political corruption and strong economic
interests rather than as acts of human sacrifice and redemption.

Fresán’s emphasis in Historia argentina is on the individuality and
wastefulness of each death. Mourning, loss, and grief do not reach
resolution through the healing aspects of triumphalism and heroism.
The death of the individual—be it during the dictatorship or in the
Malvinas/Falklands—is not transcended by a “nationalist” cause or
a stronger sense of community because the very notion or idea of
nation is now under question.
One example of how the memory of a past catastrophe is incor-
porated into the narrative is the second short story in Fresán’s “El
Aprendiz de Brujo,” in which Walt Disney’s film Fantasia serves as
the allegorical starting point for a complex cultural dialogue between
the narrator’s personal life, the Proceso, and the Malvinas/Falklands
War.2 The story also weaves in elements of the historical chronicle
incorporating the Malvinas/Falklands War and the story of the “dis-
appeared” Laura Feijoó Pearson, as the following extract shows:
The true Letitia laughed out loud on the way to the airport and would
keep on talking about Laura, dear little Laura, her dead sister. I remem-
ber: Letitia shouts in my ear something about Laura not drowning in
Punta del Este. That was just one of the many official stories made
up by our illustrious caste, she tells me. Laura, the perfect Laura
Feijoó Pearson, is disappeared, you see, she got involved with Daniel
Chevieux’s only son, daddy’s partner in the law firm. Remember? And
it seems that they were both kidnapped, and that they drowned, true,
but in the River Plate and not in Punta del Este. Thrown from a plane.
Five years ago. Disappeared and all that, you know? No, I don’t know,
I tell her . . . But this is how the story goes and truth be told I miss
Letitia a little bit. There are times when I feel overwhelmed and it is
as if I was seeing myself from the outside. My whole life I mean. I see
it as if it was another person’s . . . ever since I saw Fantasia for the first
time . . . what I see in moments like this makes these twenty five years
seem rather absurd. As if important bits and pieces of the story were
missing . . . When this happens, I think of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice—
brooms and pails out of control as a mesmerized mouse alters the laws
of the universe. (27–29)3
The passage illustrates how the autobiographical elements of the nar-

rative form a bricolage combining intertextual references to Fantasia
and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice with collective rumors about the dis-
appeared. We might say that three levels of reference interlock in
the text: an intratextual one, which reminds the reader that this is a
story, expressed in phrases like “this is how the story/history goes”;
an intertextual one, which articulates an allegory of power relations
through Fantasia and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; and finally, there is

also an extratextual one, represented through references to the disap-
peared and the Argentine navy’s “death flights” in which tortured
detainees were drugged and thrown from planes onto the River Plate
while still alive. In order to remember the missing bits and pieces,
the silences and the gaps that were officially deleted not only during
the dictatorship but also during the later process of silence and rec-
onciliation during Menem’s presidency, one must procure some other
sources of information: rumors, stories, letters, diaries, and other
nonofficial sources that provide some sort of an external or nonof-
ficial perspective.
The implication that during the Proceso there were two dimen-
sions to living experience: a public or officially sanctioned one, on
the one hand, and a private but more real or true one predicated
on rumor, on the other, suggests a split and paranoid sense of real-
ity. Also, if for the narrator “important bits and pieces of the story
are missing,” then the disappearance of people would, at an allegori-
cal level, also imply the disappearance of a dialectical history where
press censorship and terror but also, at times, a self-imposed silence
have repressed the side of the defeated. At the time of the Proceso,
therefore, it would have seemed obvious that the narrator would not
understand Letitia’s revelations since the repression was carried out in
relative secrecy and clandestinity. This suggests that fiction emerges
here with a double status: first, as a correction or reworking of a
previously erased collective memory—no matter how precarious or
fragmented—and, second, as a material or textual trace of what was
erased, forgotten, or deleted from official discourse but which keeps
coming back—through farce or allegory.
Fresán’s Historia argentina also represents some of the spatial or
geographical changes that multinational capital brought about. In the
course of the 1990s, neoliberalism penetrated Latin America across
the political spectrum. However, by the 2000s, the neoliberal model,
which President Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) implemented, failed to consolidate the social forces nec-
essary for its stabilization, resulting in the early onset of crises that
would check its course. The three largest Latin American economies
that were NAFTA’s main laboratory in the 1990s became, toward the
end of the decade, the theater for its most dramatic crises: Mexico in
1994, Brazil in 1999, and Argentina in 2002. The program crumbled
in all three without delivering on its promises.
In sociogeographical terms, the two most often cited urban
pathologies inherited from this brutal neoliberalism have been an
atomizing or fragmented pluralism and forms of survivalist alienation

(Buchanan), best exemplified in the emergence of ghettos—includ-
ing upper middle-class private real estate developments—and shanty
towns alongside massive shopping malls and entertainment “cities”
(see Filc). From this perspective, the quick changes that took place
during the transition to the neoliberal market are reflected in the
way urban space is portrayed in some of the short stories of Historia
argentina. In the following extract from another story in the book,
“La formación científica” (Scientific Training), Buenos Aires becomes
an uncanny place, a site of change and confusion:
Airports and hospitals, Arrivals & Departures, patients and travel-

lers . . . With their inevitable condition of controlled environments,
aseptic and impersonal coldness. People suspended in mid-air for
whom the outside world is almost another planet . . . I don’t under-
stand what is happening now at the airport. Because something is the
matter. I grab my suitcase and plough through a sea of uniformed men
and outraged civilians insulting them.
“The military are treating us like dogs. Aren’t we going to resist?
Are we going to meekly put up with this humiliation?” Yells a young
man with a rucksack.
“Long live democracy! Long live the homeland!” Pleads a preg-
nant woman . . . Eventually, I manage to get into a taxi. I ask the driver
what’s going on, but he can’t hear me. The radio’s volume is at full
blast and he keeps spinning the dial . . . We stop in front of my moth-
er’s house . . . I make my way down the tree-lined path to the house.
But the trees in front of what was once my childhood home are now
dwarfed by the neon fury of the new shopping mall. (Historia argen-
tina 66–73)
In the story, the narrator is an exiled scientist who has returned to

Buenos Aires to wait at his dying mother’s bedside. The violent events
he witnesses at the airport suggest a montage of several historical
events, of which the Ezeiza airport is a key geographical reference.
Although Ezeiza is usually associated with Perón’s return and the
massacre that took place at the airport, we cannot be sure that the
main event at the airport is a reference to this.4 The civilians are turn-
ing on the military—which they would not have done in 1973—who
are on the defensive, there is a World Cup on TV and elections are
being held. There is also a returned subversive (Sweater Peruano) who
thinks it is not worth whipping up revolutionary fervor ten years after
his exile. The time, 9.34, is flashing on what seems to be a digital
watch, which would place the narrative time in the mid-1980s. It
seems as if many historical events are deliberately confused, but 1982
appears to be one of the main moments guiding the story line. This
would explain references to the defeat in Malvinas—June 14, 1982,
which may also explain the civilians turning on military—plus the
Belgian victory over Argentina in the first match of the World Cup
on June 13, 1982. However, those dates do not explain everything:
there will be no elections until 1983, for example, and the sense of
political bewilderment or denial the narrator suggests that he has
taken shelter from the worst of the country’s politics—the guerra
sucia or dirty war. In addition to these rather chaotic temporal and
spatial coordinates, the passage conveys a general climate of violence
and the narrator’s awareness of changes in the urban landscape and
in people’s behavior reveals a sense of geographical confusion. The
reference to the shopping mall’s “neon fury” in the passage above,
for example, functions as a geographical anticipation of what is to
come in Buenos Aires with the advent of multinational capitalism.
Moreover, the detail of the shopping mall would fast forward the
time of the story to 1987, the year when Soleil Factory, the first mall
in Argentina, opened. Thus, this calculated dislocation of space and
time operates as a symptomatic anticipation of the beginnings of
multinational capitalism and global modernity with its consumerism,
fragmentation, and shopping mall culture.
The airport’s cold asepsis points to a dehumanization of the land-
scape as relationships become impersonal and the environment alien-
ating. Thus, the description of the airport represents the sense of
terror and isolation felt in the controlled environment of the repres-
sion years. The incorporation of airports, malls, and highways into
the narrative’s cityscape becomes inseparable from global modernity’s
process of deterritorialization. The places of global modernity such
as highways, airports, and shopping malls add an element of the
uncanny or of the phantasmagoric to the changing local cityscape “as
the comforting, familiar character of the cultural setting we routinely
move amongst conceals the influences of distant social forces and
processes” (Giddens 141). The presentation of the shopping mall as
existing in a disjointed or atemporal historical context reveals how
international capital interests benefited from (state) violence.
Historia argentina fused moments of an absurd and bleak sense of
humor with the allegorical reworking of pop and mass media cultural
references, which in turn, were shaped by the historical chronicle and
autobiographical details. The result was a rethinking of national his-
tory from multiple perspectives and subject positions and an opening
of the private to the public sphere through trauma, which still resem-
bled postdictatorial narratives. In later works, however, the aesthetic
of memory and defeat gives way to a more cosmopolitan but at the

same time less political mode of writing no longer exclusively con-
cerned with national history and identity. This shift in Fresán coin-
cided, to a certain extent, with the emergence of McOndo (1996),
a literary anthology of short stories compiled by Chileans Alberto
Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, who advocated incorporating elements of
North American and Latin American mass culture into literary texts
without creating consumer-oriented products and employing a writ-
ing style consciously distant from the Boom’s magic-realist aesthetic.
In the 1990s, the Latin American writers who participated in
McOndo rejected magical realism as a commercial stereotype for
export and chose instead to set their stories in urban cityscapes that
incorporated mass-mediated codes and pop references while retain-
ing a certain degree of technical difficulty. The rejection of the
magical realist aesthetic dated back to 1994, when, while attend-
ing an International Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa,
Alberto, Fuguet submitted a short story to The Iowa Review. The
short story was rejected by the editor on the grounds that “it wasn’t
Latin American enough,” that is to say, it did not contain any fan-
tastical or magical realist elements in it that made it publishable in
the United States and so, as the editor later remarked, “the story
could easily have taken place right here, in [North] America” (Fuguet
“I am NOT”). According to Fuguet, the Latin American topics the
publishers expected were either stories about the underdeveloped or
the exotic, sagas of suffering farm laborers, or magic realist worlds.
In 1996, Fuguet decided to publish McOndo, inviting young writers
from Latin America and Spain to contribute their short stories. Most
of these writers had started their literary careers in the 1990s, thereby
suggesting some sort of a generational identity.
As the introductory manifesto in the anthology explained, the
term “McOndo” was meant to connote an alternative or other Latin
America full of McDonald’s, Macintosh computers, and condomini-
ums, in direct opposition to the exotic mysticism of García Márquez’s
magical place Macondo in his masterpiece Cien años de soledad
(One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967). Their short stories were a
response not only to a world in which literature had lost its status
as a privileged means of expression, but also in which the transna-
tional cultural crossings that characterized the turn of the century
became thematized in the plots themselves. In fact, a United States/
Tex-Mex/Chilean/Argentine hybridity characterizes Fuguet’s own
narrative contribution to McOndo, “La verdad o las consecuencias”
(“Truth or Consequences”), which includes constant cross-references
to the popular cultures of those nations. The prologue to the book

outlines the cultural profile of the McOndo writer: a young Latin
American author who rejects magical realism as a literary mode,
which has served to exoticize representations of Latin America. The
continent the McOndo writer sees, especially since the beginning of
the 1990s, is a Latin America of shopping malls, cable television, sub-
urbs, and pollution, which is the exact opposite of García Márquez’s
mythical country.
The representations of the new subjectivities these writers explore
are no doubt tied to the historic moment of cultural and economic
globalization, to the erosion of the frontiers of the nation-state and
a local sense of identity crossed by transnational networks of commu-
nication that García Canclini has persistently identified as the specific
reality of many Latin American countries today (“Hybrid Cultures”;
Globalización). But the McOndo anthology also came to function as a
critique of international market capitalism, which prescribed the sort
of cultural difference of Latin America to be consumed abroad. As
Fuguet claimed in those days:
In the past, Latin American writers felt compelled to leave their home
countries to be able to write about them. Not only were they seeking
political freedom, but cultural nourishment. As expatriates they idea-
lised their countries to the point that they created a world that never
really existed. I feel very comfortable at my desk in Santiago, writing
about the world around me. A world that comes to me through televi-
sion, radio, the Internet and movies, which I send back through my
fiction. My Latin American fiction. (“I am NOT”)
Although Fuguet’s statement clearly generalizes and oversimplifies

the Latin American fiction of the Boom period—from the late 1950s
to the early 1970s—his views coincide with what García Canclini has
identified as the main focus of any study of culture in Latin America:
from the 1980s onward the formation of new hybrid identities in
Latin America requires an awareness of a broader social context and
of frontier or transnational cultural exchanges that cannot be reduced
to the old dualisms of local/foreign or popular/high culture (García
Canclini, “Estudios Culturales”). These identities owe much to the
neoliberal policies that swept the continent in the 1980s and 1990s,
with transnational corporations owning most of the media. Although
it is true to say that “the world comes to [us] through television,
radio, the Internet and movies” as Fuguet puts it, one still wonders
which world that is, and whether globalization does not implicitly
amount to a wholesale Americanization of culture and to the repro-

duction of clichéd and exoticized versions of anything not fitting this
pattern (“I am NOT”).
It is puzzling that despite his diatribe against the US academia’s
notions of the Latin American canon and the market prescription
of the Latin American difference, Fuguet feels he is not involved in
any political agenda. In effect, he has stated that “in a continent that
was once ultra-politicised, young, apolitical writers like myself are
now writing without an overt agenda about their experiences” (“I am
NOT,” emphasis added). Although Fuguet is deeply aware of the his-
torical and ideological distance between the more politicized writing
of the 1960s revolutionary utopias and his own postmodernism, his
book nevertheless engages with debates on the politics of identity
and globalization that theorists like John Tomlinson (Globalization;
“Agenda”) and García Canclini (“Hybrid Cultures”; Globalización)
have identified at the core of cultural studies and political sociol-
ogy today. In fact, Fuguet himself has stated that globalization and
its impact on the individual are a fundamental part of his literary
agenda:
I feel the great literary theme of Latin American identity (who are we?)
must now take a back seat to the theme of personal identity (Who
am I?). The McOndo writers . . . base their stories on individual lives,
instead of collective epics. This new genre may be one of the byprod-
ucts of a free market economy and the privatization craze that has
swept South America . . . I don’t deny that there exists a colorful, exotic
aspect to Latin America, but in my opinion, life on this continent is
far too complex to be so simply categorised. It is an injustice to reduce
the essence of Latin America to men in ponchos and sombreros, gun-
toting drug lords and sensual salsa-swinging señoritas. (“I am NOT”)
In a 2002 interview with Rodrigo Fresán, Fuguet reiterated his sup-

posedly apolitical approach to literature: “Although I don’t believe
McOndo is my flag, I do agree with some of its basic ideas: glo-
balization as an inescapable fact, mongrelization, the exhaustion
of nativism and of magical realism, and the possibility of not being
politically committed, etc.” (“Alberto Fuguet”). No doubt globaliza-
tion is differently experienced and imagined according to the reality
one lives as García Canclini suggests, since it is also true that words
like “free market economy” and “the privatization craze” are far
from being politically innocent. In fact, the central social and politi-
cal issue today, for García Canclini, is not to defend a local/national
identity—Is there one?—nor to become globalized but to find ways

of understanding heterogeneity, difference, and inequality when the
old local certainties have lost their prominent role, stereotypes have
broken down, and people have access to other cultural imaginaries
(Globalización 30).
Still, we might say that this is not enough. For we must also ask
where such cultural heterogeneity leads to. Does it lead us only to
“political correctness” and multicultural tolerance, or does it lead
us to more democratic forms of governance where the social and
political demands of all are heard and given a voice? How, in other
words, does multicultural heterogeneity translate into social jus-
tice and fairer societies? And how can literary and cultural texts as
forms of critique instruct us in this? The affirmation of the local
does not need to be an obstacle to or a denial of the global, but it
does pose the question of what it means to enter globalization in
different ways than through the mere “McDonaldization” of the
world. There are, as García Canclini argues, many other intermedi-
ary positions between McDonald’s and García Márquez’s Macondo
(Globalización 51–52).
In Argentina, at least from the 1980s onward, the debate has
largely revolved around the convergence of a narrowly understood
entertainment or celebrity culture with the interests of large media
corporations. The main issue has become whether to produce and
consume cultural goods that are critical and challenging or light,
mass-produced, and profitable entertainment as García Canclini
argues in La Globalización imaginada (Imagined Globalization,
1999, 196). García Canclini’s notion of the dramas of real individuals
appears more politically and socially committed to the fate of collec-
tives than Fuguet’s preference for the theme of personal identity. In
other words, shifting the burden of the discussion to the individual
does not do away with collectively shared problems, even if we now
know perfectly well that class struggle here does not mean a simple
nostalgic conception of the proletariat as the primary agent of social
transformation, but social movements in this or that specific local/
regional/national situation. If anything, Fuguet’s narrowly construed
individual needs to become reconfigured and adapted to the current
neoliberal condition because only from a comfortable upper-middle
class position can individuals express their individual choice. The job-
less, the poor, the exploited, and the indigenous communities who
fight for their land are far from being individuals without commonly
shared epic struggles. However, we must agree with Fuguet that Latin
America is much more than men with ponchos.
Like Fuguet and the other writers of the McOndo group, Fresán’s
Historia argentina is quite far removed from any magical realist or
Macondian stereotypical representation of Latin America as under-
developed, rural, or exotic. This is not surprising in view of the
Argentine preference for fantasy and modernist surrealism rather
than magical realism and for the avant-garde experimental writing of
authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Julio Cortázar, Manuel
Puig, Ricardo Piglia, and Juan José Saer. But whereas in Fresán’s
Historia argentina the stories were spun from the extratextual rem-
nants of past historical catastrophes, the later books are concerned
less with those specific remnants of history and more with the act
of writing and the theme of memory detached from any actual or
real experience. We are presented in these later novels with history as
pastiche or nostalgia, as Jameson would say (Postmodernism). Thus,
what before was the trace or fragment of a concrete autobiographical
or extratextual memory, now becomes a self-reflexive, purely inter-
textual pseudo-philosophical rumination on the nature of memory
itself as an abstract theme. This is as close to the international style in
literature as can be imagined.
Fresán’s more recent novels, Mantra (2001) and Jardines de
Kensington (Kensington Gardens, 2004), move closer to the kind
of apolitical textuality typical of some postmodernist fictions that
Fredric Jameson has defined as pastiche (Postmodernism 17). Mantra
is divided into three main sections. The first part is a fictional auto-
biographical account of the narrator’s traumatic childhood as he grew
up in Argentina of the 1970s amid a dysfunctional family of middle-
class Montonero revolutionaries—again there is much that is truly
autobiographical for Fresán here.5 The second part radically moves
the setting to Mexico, D.F. in the late 1990s and, in addition, intro-
duces a parodic rewriting of Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece, Pedro Páramo
(1955). It also pays intertextual homage to William Burroughs “cut-
up” technique through a highly fragmented, montaged ensemble of
various artists’ and historical personages’ impressions of Mexico City,
which are then combined with the story of the narrator’s adventures
in this city. The third part offers a futuristic and apocalyptic rewrit-
ing of Pedro Páramo’s Comala a la Philip K. Dick as the narrator
becomes the only surviving android after a quake has destroyed the
Mexico City. The novel finishes with the usual acknowledgments to
the book’s various intertextual sources, that is to say, the many books,
textbooks, and reference books Fresán consulted before writing
Mantra. Geographically, Mantra moves from the narrator’s child-
hood in Buenos Aires to his death in Mexico City, and spans three
decades, from the 1970s in Argentina to the end of the millennium

in Mexico. The story begins when the unnamed first-person narrator
meets his new fifth grade partner, Máximo Mantra, a Mexican child,
at Gervasio Cabrera elementary school in Buenos Aires. The first part
takes place sometime around 1974, and is partly focused on the narra-
tor’s dysfunctional Montonero parents. The critique of the narrator’s
family also functions, figuratively, as a critique of certain sectors of
the Argentine middle-class who, in 1969, joined massive student and
workers’ protests such as the famous Cordobazo and Rosariazo when
Argentine university students first mobilized against Onganía’s dic-
tatorship (1966–1970). Onganía started his campaign against liberal
and Marxist influences with a move against the country’s public uni-
versities in August 1966, restricting political activism and revising the
university’s curriculum (Lewis, History 128–132). Between 1970 and
1973, some of the student movements became even more radicalized
and joined armed resistance groups—like the Ejército Revolucionario
del Pueblo and Montoneros—which, in turn, joined forces with the
militant leaders of trade union movements.
The narrator’s class-conscious critique targets his parents for
belonging to the well-off middle class who could afford the luxury of
a house with a swimming pool but, at the same time, and contradic-
torily for him, fought state oppression and corporate capitalism. This
middle class and mostly student-led movement was sympathetic to the
industrial proletariat and quickly became involved in grassroots agita-
tion and protests. The participation of middle class students in such
political activism is explained through the active role intellectuals at
last felt they had in the liberation of people and the nation. As Paul
Lewis explains: “the violent deed turned out to be [equally] liberating
for the formerly frustrated intellectual who felt cut off from the real
world of doers. He now ceased to be an impotent, irresolute critic or
spectator and became an actor at the center stage of history” (33).
The narrator’s bitterness in Mantra is based on the irony that
the violence his intellectual parents supposedly perpetrated against
the capitalist supermarkets ended up blurring the line between the
oppressors and the oppressed, leveling the violence of one against
the other. This not only resulted in personal and family trauma—as
was Fresán’s own case in real life—but also, as the narrator seems to
suggest, provided the Argentine army and the extreme political right
with a perfect excuse to suspend democracy and suppress political dis-
sidence in the name of public law and order. The novel conveys a very
clear sense of guilt and blame, therefore, held against at least some
of the Argentine middle class first for their willingness to engage in
violence—bombing supermarkets and defending “the cause”—and

second, for their later complicit silence when the junta’s dictatorship
began its fight against subversion. Equating state and guerrilla vio-
lence, however, rests upon a rather trite and Manichean argument
that assumes an equal deployment of violence on both sides, a point
many historians have already amply demonstrated to be erroneous
(see Heinz and Frühling; D. K. Lewis).
The rejection of what was a painful experience, both in the pri-
vate and public spheres, leads the narrator to feel contempt for his
home and homeland and to adopt Mexico as a new foster national-
ity. Extratextually, it would be quite difficult to miss how obviously
autobiographical this passage is. In fact, in an April 2006 interview,
Fresán confessed that he and his (Mexican) wife decided not to live
either in Argentina or in Mexico but to move to a neutral place like
Barcelona in 1999 in order to escape a difficult relationship with
both their parents. It was also around this time that Fresán began
to consciously legitimate his profile as a cosmopolitan writer, draw-
ing on a rich tradition of Argentine writers like Cortázar, Puig, and
Borges and finding theoretical justification in Borges’s essay, “The
Argentine Writer and Tradition.” In a recent interview Fresán reas-
serted his view that “A writer’s real homeland, or, his DNA, is his
home library” (Moreno and Fresán, 2007). It is somewhat contradic-
tory, however, that Fresán should invoke notions of nationality as far
as a literary tradition is concerned—he never once hesitates to situ-
ate himself in the prestigious Argentine literary tradition of Borges
and Cortázar—but, at the same time, radically deny and reject his
national identity understood not only as a literary genealogy but also
as a sociopolitical and historically informed cultural identity. Fresán is
content to repeat the cliché that “we are a very new country . . . all our
forefathers came from Europe” and that Argentine cultural identity
is cosmopolitan because “our roots are in the world, and the world is
where the library is” (Lethem and Fresán). However, he is less happy
when it comes to admitting that he is Argentine in more ways than
this suggests.
Fresán’s strategic defense is to claim that cosmopolitanism is the
cross-pollination of literary legacies and, within the context of capi-
talism, is the adoptionof an international style in response to the glo-
balization of the literary market. He does not necessarily write for
an Argentine audience any more, nor does he care to reconstruct the
Argentine experience to the foreign reader. This is clearly a writer
who is pulled apart by two opposing but equally obsessive impulses:
to remember a past that returns like a haunting ghost in the form of
childhood trauma, and, at the same time, to delete and deny this past
as a traumatic remainder of less happy times. Fresán’s position can
be contrasted with Salman Rushdie’s, who in his essay “Imaginary
Homelands” (1991) points out that writers in his position—exiles,
migrants, or expatriates—are haunted not only by a sense of loss but
also by an impulse to recover and reconstruct that past. Rushdie sug-
gests a useful distinction between the exiled writer haunted by a sense
of loss and an exiled writer, like Fresán, who is haunted by childhood
trauma. While the first type of writer is driven to reconstruct and
reclaim the past, or to write about his lost homeland as something
newly found—as a new identity as yet to be partly reclaimed, partly
imagined—the second type is driven first to cynically acknowledge
the past as a source of trauma and, second, to try and delete the
memory of that trauma. The task, however, might be impossible
because the trace of the trauma has already been fixed—and at the
same time repressed—in the written text itself. Furthermore, when a
writer tries to reconstruct his homeland from abroad, “he is obliged,”
says Rushdie, “to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments
have been irretrievably lost” (11). Paradoxically, fragmentation takes
on a positive value here, for “the broken mirror may actually be as
valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed” (11). In contrast,
for the traumatized narrator of Mantra: “One may have had a hor-
rible childhood, but if one read under the light of great books during
the darkness of those days, when the time to remember comes, it is
possible to opt for the comfort and happiness of those fictions and
not for the sorrows of a poorly written reality” (Mantra 126). That
is to say, unlike Rushdie, for the narrator of Mantra, and, it is safe
to assume, for Fresán himself, the ugly fragments of reality are to
be discarded and replaced by other—improved/edited—fragments,
those of fiction or culture at large. Fiction is here to help us forget the
world, not better understand it. This idea brings us back to the sani-
tized products ready for cultural consumption typical of globaliza-
tion. The problem comes when those fragments are not only not an
improvement on reality but little more than de-historicized clichés.
As Rushdie puts it, “the broken glass is not merely a mirror of nostal-
gia. It is also, I believe, a useful tool with which to work in the pres-
ent” (12). In effect, this raises once again the question of the critical
function of art and the extent to which literature can or perhaps must,
as Rushdie says, “give the lie to official facts” (14).
Moreover, when it comes to the last two sections of Mantra,
which focus on Mexico, the issue of how clichéd his reconstruction
of Mexican identity is emerged in a press interview Fresán gave on
account of publishing house Mondadori’s launching of the book

series to which Mantra belongs.6 When asked why he had preferred
to portray such a stereotypical version of Mexico, Fresán replied:
That was precisely what I wanted to write. I didn’t want to narrate

the book from the perspective of a Mexican, because that would have
meant a lot of hard work and research, and I still would have made
millions of errors no matter what. My intention was to preserve this
foreigner’s view of the city. And this is what the three narrators of
Mantra somehow are: extreme forms of foreignness—one is a tumor,
another is a robot and the third one is dead. Aren’t these the crudest
forms of foreignness imaginable? (Montaño Garfias 2002)
The review of the novel published in the Mexican newspaper La

Jornada clearly states that “the main character [of Mantra] is Mexico
City with all the clichés that a foreigner can use to address this city
and, in general, to whatever is Mexican: wrestling, soap operas, patri-
otic love for the motherland and old love songs” (Montaño Garfias
2002, emphasis added). So, why should we care to read this novel at
all? Linda Hutcheon (1988) has argued that historiographic metafic-
tional novels either acknowledge that they are a fiction from begin-
ning to end; or else, and more radically, they problematize the very
act of trying to write a fictional/historical account of an entity that
actually exists in reality. Hutcheon states that postmodernism wel-
comes and celebrates a plural, multiple, or heterogeneous identity, but
one is left to wonder, after reading Mantra, how this identity is to be
understood: as a plurally lived or experienced one or as mere simu-
lacra, reproduced as so many accounts of an imagined but ultimately
trite and stereotyped “reality”?
For literature to have some sort of a transformative function, or
for the literary imagination to encourage some sort of a “politicized
reflexive aesthetics,” as Brooker argues, perhaps something more is
needed than mere textual skill (23). In the same way that we need to
eschew the dangers of a “ghetto mentality” (Rushdie 19) and look
beyond the local community to the larger world outside, we need to
distrust a superficially conceived cosmopolitanism or a cultural impe-
rialism that takes whatever it needs from the cultural supermarket as
if it were its own. Again, what matters, as Brooker explains, is whether
this collage of fragments is “a socially relevant bricolage” (28) or sheer
entertainment. Is it a contestatory bricolage that sets all the multiple
fragments in tension with each other? Does this textual hybridity
“give the lie to official facts,” as Rushdie hopes? Does it contest, ques-
tion, subvert all the clichés that globalized media perpetually employs
to (re)construct identities? Or does it help, on the contrary, only to

reaffirm and perpetuate those clichés?
It is difficult not to see Fresán’s Mantra, in this sense, as symptom-
atic of how consumer capitalism reifies and sanitizes simulacra versions
of reality, of national and cultural identity. In Mantra, the myriad
intertextual references to other fiction writers and works, both canoni-
cal and marginal, and a cross-pollination of fiction and nonfiction—
letters, travel, and personal diary fragments, quotes from travelling
guides, pseudo-scientific handbooks—hybridize the discourse, open-
ing it up to a multiplicity of voices, but these do not amount to a plural
platform from which to criticize received perceptions of Mexico. This
is the cityscape of McOndo, indeed, but at its worst.
A final aspect of the novel worth considering is its intertextual con-
nections to Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece Pedro Páramo, which structures
about two thirds of the book. Unlike Rulfo’s textually inscribed poli-
tics about a premodern Mexico “being traversed by secular moder-
nity” (Sharman 143), Fresán’s Mantra seems to engage in endless
schizophrenic ramblings for 539 pages that mix the monologic voice
of the narrator, with the voices of historical figures such as William
Burroughs, Sergei Eisenstein, Joan Vollmer, and Aldous Huxley
among many others. However, the “new” version of Pedro Páramo
translates or updates the technique but not its politics: that is, it does
not translate into a postmodern register Rulfo’s critique of the caci-
quismo of Mexico’s quasifeudal social order still in place during the
country’s transition to modernity. As Sharman argues, in Rulfo, the
cacique “operates at the point where the premodern intersects with
the rational-legal-bureaucratic order of modernity, epitomized by the
system of law” (143). The cacique is a figure of the utmost impor-
tance in Pedro Páramo, as Sharman argues, insofar as it is not only
the depredations of capitalism and the selling of communal lands that
destroy Comala but also by the will of one man. However, when
Fresán rewrites the story in the time of global capitalism, the ques-
tion that inevitably arises is whatever happened to the cacique? What
has taken his or her place in this day and age of global capitalism?
It is, of course, the case that nowadays, as García Canclini would
put it, “David doesn’t know where Goliath is” (Globalización), that
is, global capitalism is everywhere and nowhere, and the cacique has
become a whole network of invisible forces, and so, to a certain extent,
this new socioeconomic situation would justify and explain Fresán’s
schizophrenic narrative. And yet, nowhere in the novel does one feel
any sort of explicit, reflexive critique, in Brooker’s sense of the term,
being directed at it.
I want to conclude this chapter by focusing on Fresán’s novel

Jardines de Kensington. The narrative is set in London and Scotland
as the stories of Peter Pan and James Matthew Barrie are intertwined
in a tale that shifts from contemporary London to Victorian England,
and then to the swinging sixties. The change of setting coincided
with this being Fresán’s first book translated into English and with
its release both in the United Kingdom (Faber and Faber) and in
the United States (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux). In the acknowledg-
ments to Jardines de Kensington and in an interview with Jonathan
Lethem, Fresán has said that the idea for a narrative involving Peter
Pan and the life of James Matthew Barrie came to him one day after
watching a TV documentary about the life and works of the writer
(Fresán, Kensington 412; Lethem and Fresán). This recalls Fuguet’s
claim that today the world comes to us mediated through TV, radio,
and the Internet. The note also makes clear that Fresán has never
been to London and that his knowledge of the city only came from
books he has read. Like the places he describes, names and other
English cultural references are incorporated into the text through
listing and cataloguing without any grounding in actual experience.
The narrative seems bent on proving that a Latin American writer
need not write about Latin American topics in order to succeed in
the global market as the review blurbs in the UK and the United
States demonstrate. The novel was criticized in newspaper reviews
in the United Kingdom for its self-indulgent ramblings, endless list-
ings, and cataloguing that lead to constant digressions from the main
narrative. The narrator embarks in a series of abstract meditations
on the nature of mourning, memory, writing, identity, childhood,
and so on (see reviews by Eaude and De Groot). However, the big-
gest change the reviews failed to foreground was no doubt the com-
plete absence of the theme of Argentine identity and of the historical
chronicle, which were still present in the first section of Mantra, but
which have all but disappeared here in exchange for a kind of book-
inspired cosmopolitanism. The novel thus presents a purer level of
fabulation and intertextuality than any of his previous works and the
themes of death, loss, and memory take on a private or very personal
overtone but are totally devoid of a larger public/historical context.
Much of the swinging sixties episodes seem to be a clichéd or even
pastiched reconstruction of the period as they have been wholly taken
from Fresán’s readings of other books. His account of London in the
Victorian era and in the 1960s is thus wholly textual in nature. To a
great degree, the previous interface between reality and fiction that
was seen in his use of the historical chronicle in Historia argentina
or in the first section of Mantra is here replaced by a fiction–fiction

relationship that acknowledges other texts as its only reality. Losing
the connections between the historical chronicle and social experi-
ence means that the political significance of the novel—in terms of its
representation of the utopian 1960s—is to a great extent lost as well.
Jardines de Kensington does not offer much in the way of a politicized/
critical art.
Fresán has declared that although he was born an Argentine, he
hopes to die a writer since a writer’s true homeland is his library
(Montanaro). In his case this position does not seem to be much
more than the utmost reduction of experience to the merely textual,
to the point where the connection between real life experiences and
reading and writing is made redundant. The texts become little more
than imaginative works lacking the kinds of links between fiction and
life that characterized Historia argentina. For Fresán, then, global-
ization has meant a superficial identification of the Argentine writer
with the whole of Western culture at large, a total deterritorialization
of the narrative from the geographical and historical locations of his
native country. A reading of Jardines de Kensington reveals no alter-
native reterritorialization in a European/Western history beyond a
recycling of literary commonplaces. The exile tends to write about
the homeland and the cosmopolitan is said to be at home in many
countries, but Fresán seems rather to be homeless. Perhaps, not much
more can be said except that Jardines de Kensington is a symptom of
what the loss of a historical grounding, or, more pointedly, the lack
of political intent, comes to mean in one version of postmodernism.
It is after all a product of its historical moment.
Notes
1. These issues of memory and forgetting are tied to historically based
societal trauma. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
this is connected to the cold war period of Soviet rule in the region.
Rwanda is dealing with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide of eth-
nic Tutsis in which over 500,000 people were killed in the space of
100 days (for more, see Des Forges). Lesser known, however, is the
civil war in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970, which resulted in the deaths
of over a million ethnic Ibgos (see Korieh). South Africa created
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the way to
proceed in a post-apartheid system in a way which focused largely
on restorative justice. Finally, in Australia the stolen generations is
a term used to describe the removal of Aboriginal children by the
government to be placed in orphanages or foster homes from 1909
to 1969 (see “Bringing them Home”).
2. El Proceso, or El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional is the term

given to refer to the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976
to the return of the democratic process in 1983 with the election of
Raúl Alfonsin.
3. This and other translations from Spanish language texts are mine,
unless otherwise noted in the bibliography.
4. When Juan Perón returned from exile on June 20, 1973, members of
the right-wing arm of Peronism opened fire on the leftist Juventud
Peronista (Peronist Youth) killing at least 13. For more on this, see
Horacio Verbitsky’s Ezeiza (1985).
5. The Montoneros were a leftist urban guerrilla group in Argentina.
6. Mantra belongs to Mondadori’s book series “Colección Año 0.” The
series focuses on describing the experience of inhabiting modern cities.
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183–197.
Fresán, Rodrigo. Historia argentina. Buenos Aires: Fábula, 1991.
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Press, 2006.
Chapter 6
An Impossible Witness of
The Armies
Lotte Buiting
I n an unnamed town in rural Colombia, a retired colonel spends

entire afternoons in the privy, suffering from his wildly flowering
intestinal flora. In another rural town, San José, a retired school-
teacher sits down on a cafe’s terrace to give his injured knee a rest. As
he is about to leave, he realizes he has unwittingly wet himself. These
two aging men, both tormented by the ailments of old age that put
them into humiliating situations, are separated by almost fifty years
of history and literature, and yet their worlds are remarkably similar.
The colonel is the protagonist of Gabriel García Márquez’s El coro-
nel no tiene quien le escribe (No One Writes to the Colonel, 1961),
a short novel about the colonel’s interminable wait for a letter about
his much-needed and hard-earned veteran pension. Almost fifty
years later, the Colombian Evelio Rosero publishes Los ejércitos (The
Armies, 2007), which I propose to read in conjunction with García
Márquez’s short novel. Ismael is a retired teacher living an unevent-
ful, relatively calm life with his wife, Otilia. The portentous presence
of the armies—either paramilitaries or the guerilla—interrupts daily
life when one day Otilia disappears. Ismael’s life turns into a terrible
wait for a note from the kidnappers, and into a painful degeneration.
Casting his magical realist shadow far over Colombian literary
production, García Márquez is the inevitable reference—the “over-
whelming father figure” (Hoyos “Sublime Violence” 16)—by which
contemporary Colombian authors are measured and compared. One
certainly cannot read a Colombian novel about an elderly man wait-
ing for a letter that never arrives, without establishing a dialogue with
García Márquez’s colonel. To be sure, in one way or another every
literary work positions itself along the lines of tradition and rupture.
134 Lot t e Buiting
My interest in this chapter is precisely the (dis)continuities between

García Márquez’s canonical work and Rosero’s own literary proposal.
Specifically, I intend to explore how Rosero takes up many of the
themes of his predecessor, actualizing their sociopolitical context and
propelling them into entirely new directions. Otilia’s disappearance
and the resultant uncertainty surrounding her absence, caused by the
letter that never arrives, transform Ismael into a Freudian melancholic.
While García Márquez’s protagonist lives in dire circumstances and
extreme poverty, he knows he is entitled to a pension, and he manages
to hold on to hope and a sense of humor.
Rosero’s protagonist has no such certainty, and the decay of his
humanity takes a much more pronounced form, leading to a final,
suicidal gesture. Standing in front of an unofficial firing squad,
Ismael will not repeat that other colonel’s reminiscing of his child-
hood memories.1 Instead, he will confront the reader with a narrato-
logical paradox, which will ultimately posit Ismael as the impossible
witness to his town’s violence. Los ejércitos actualizes the sociohistori-
cal context of violence from El coronel, which it expresses through
the interminable wait for a letter that never arrives.
Although Los ejércitos most conspicuously establishes a dialogue
with this one particular work by García Márquez, it also functions in
the context of Latin American literary traditions and contemporary
literary developments. In one way or another, Latin American con-
temporary writers have to reckon with the tradition of the Boom.2
Due to its overwhelmingly positive reception and astronomical sales
worldwide, readers and editors alike often understand the Boom as a
synecdoche of Latin American literature at large. Moreover, publishing
houses are eager to have their share of the pie and serve a market hun-
gry for new magical realist writings. Although the Boom is difficult to
bracket convincingly by dates (Rama 188–193), the 1970s and 1980s
witnessed what some critics have called the Post-Boom writings.3 The
Post-Boom novels tend to shun the tendencies generally associated
with the Boom, most notably magical realism, although magical real-
ism’s commercial success simultaneously assures the proliferation of an
insistent and insipid recycling of magical realist clichés.4
In 1996, two texts explicitly propose to break with this latter
phenomenon: in Chile Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez publish
McOndo, with a prologue that reads as a statement of principles, while
the Crack Manifesto was first read in August 1996 during a joint
book presentation of the five Crack authors in Mexico City (Castillo
Pérez 83).5 Both McOndo and the Crack resist a comprehensive
definition. However, one of the Crack’s promulgators, Jorge Volpi,
A n I m p o s s i bl e W i t n e s s o f Th e A r m i es 135
points to a singular converging characteristic between the two texts:

“Although there were others who thought it before, McOndo and
the Crack really brought the bankruptcy of magical realism to the
table” (Volpi).6 Its elusive identity has haunted the Crack since its first
pronunciation, and finds its origin in the equally ambiguous docu-
ment that inaugurated the group. Despite its proposition as a “mani-
festo,” its authors do not purport to present a uniform set of literary
ideas, nor do they have the intention to cause a literary revolution.
In fact, the Manifesto proposes no literary project at all, as Padilla
exclaims: “There can be no greater proposal than the lack of one”
(Chávez Castañeda et al). The Crack envisions itself continuing the
Latin American and Western tradition of great literary classics, and
proposes the return to an aspect of the Boom that the mechanical
reproductions of magical realism eschew, one that is characterized
by formal innovation and Cortázar’s “active participation” (Chávez
Castañeda et al).7 However, to cite but two examples, both Volpi’s
En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor, 1999) and Padilla’s
Amphitryon (Shadow Without a Name, 2000), which explore betrayal
and shifting identities in the Nazi Third Reich, comfortably allow the
reader to follow the flow of narration without “actively participating”
in its creation. And yet, this does not mean that these novels do not
accomplish the Manifesto’s postulates, for the obscurity of their liter-
ary nonproposal makes any such claim unproductive.
In Chile, the editors of McOndo share their frustration with
the North American editors who refused to publish Fuguet’s story
because it lacked magical realism.8 Fuguet and Gómez aspire to write
and publish works that originate in “McOndo,” the imaginary city
they grew up in that is no longer Ángel Rama’s lettered city, but a
digitized city, one where global pop culture informs the local cul-
tural production. With their anthology of Latin American short sto-
ries they purport to put the, then, relatively unknown writers on the
map, to show there does indeed exist such as thing as Ibero-American
writing that “could well have been written in any country of the First
World” (10).
To be sure, although some of Latin America’s literary production
is covered by the Post-Boom and the self-proclaimed literary currents,
several of the most remarkable and innovative literary works of the
past decades have been put forward by writers that fall outside of those
paradigms. Contemporary literature can no longer be adequately cap-
tured by literary movements or groups affiliated with a certain liter-
ary journal. Diamela Eltit, Cristina Peri Rossi, or Roberto Bolaño,
to name but a few broadly acclaimed authors, cannot be properly
136 Lot t e Buiting
categorized as Post-Boom, nor do Carmen Boullosa or Alan Pauls,

to cite more recent examples, pertain to the Crack or the McOndo
generation.9
All these movements and developments intersect and overlap in a
constant push and pull with literary traditions. Evelio Rosero’s work
must be situated in the interstices of those junctions: it subtly cracks
open the legacy of García Márquez with novels that, although starkly
realistic, also present the gloomy, magical force through which the
abandoned town of San José acquires an eerily phantasmagoric qual-
ity. In contrast to the Buendía family, who never so much acknow
ledge the existence of the city, the inhabitants of Rosero’s San José are
acutely aware of the Latin American metropolis. Ismael’s daughter
lives with her family in Popayán, the capital of the province Cauca,
and insistently urges her parents to move in with her, but Otilia and
Ismael are immune to the city’s spell and its fraudulent promise of a
way out: “Neither Otilia nor I had any hesitation: we were never leav-
ing here” (132). Rosero’s novel, which does not pertain to any literary
group or movement, achieves what the Crack proclaims but fails to
accomplish: it engages with literary tradition, while it simultaneously
forges a completely new literary project.
The connections between Rosero and García Márquez are not lim-
ited to the two novels under scrutiny here. One discerns parallels,
for example, between the characters of Rosero’s Los almuerzos (Good
Offices, 2001) and those that populate García Márquez’s stories in
Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (Big Mama’s Funeral, 1962) or
Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967). The
latter’s Fernanda del Carpio, victim of a rigid, sexually repressive
Catholic upbringing, reappears in Rosero’s Los almuerzos as one, or
all three, of the Lilias. The Lilias are elderly women who religiously
serve the priest of their parish church, but who are in want of recogni-
tion, power, and autonomy. They finally unleash their repressed and
frustrated sexual desires in a delirious, murderous outburst. Whether
or not these characters with a decidedly García Márquez flavor owe
their existence to Rosero’s careful reading of his compatriot is largely
irrelevant.10 They do manifest how many of the thematic preoccupa-
tions in García Márquez’s work, which often sprout from Colombian
history and reality, also inform Rosero’s novels. Los ejércitos, none-
theless, reflects a radically different historical reality from El coronel.
Moreover, the Lilias’ ferocious wrath is testament to Rosero’s style.
Whereas García Márquez’s denouements tend to be larger than life,
magical apocalypses that provide narrative closure, Rosero’s char-
acters end up in extreme situations, but those are stripped of their
magical aura—they display uncomfortable graphic violence and are

starkly realistic.
Both El coronel and Los ejércitos grapple with the question of nar-
rating violence, and Los ejércitos needs to be understood in the tra-
dition of violence in twentieth-century Colombian literature.11 The
period between the 1940s and 1960s, spanning nearly twenty years,
has become known elusively, and ambiguously as “La Violencia”:
“[The term La Violencia] is vague enough to avoid a confrontation
with historical responsibilities, imprecise enough to match the lack
of a generally accepted framework for its proper comprehension,
and lastly, chilling enough to bring about what one would call in
Freudian terms its uncanniness” (Hoyos “Sublime Violence” 5).
The early novels of La Violencia are often instrumental in political
debates addressing the incessant violence, and often depict crude
violence.12 In response to that graphic display of violence, the next
wave of novels addressing La Violencia, including El coronel, evokes
violence through suggestion, illustrating its effects rather than its
execution. The last cycle, which according to many critics com-
mences with Fernando Vallejo’s Nuestra virgen de los sicarios (Our
Lady of the Assassins, 1994), assumes violence as part of daily life,
and often transforms it into a spectacle. Publishing houses stimulate
the circulation of those texts in an international market to generate
broad readership, which many of the novels accomplish by narrating
“stories full of eroticism and drama, . . . molded into genre schemas
which invigorate the prose and facilitate the unproblematic consump-
tion of the tale” (Rueda “Dislocaciones” 71). They have been well
received, by readers and critics alike, and have been awarded many
international prizes.13 Rosero’s novel seems to partake in this editorial
fashion. It exists in multiple translations, received the Tusquets Novel
Award in 2006, and, three years later, the prestigious Independent
Foreign Fiction Prize. Furthermore, many of the novels in this last
cycle concern themselves with drug trafficking, and the term “sicar-
esca” (sicaresque) has been coined to describe them (Jácome 11–15).14
Although Los ejércitos cannot be inscribed in the sicaresque proper, it
does share some of its characteristics, especially the way in which the
townspeople relate to violence. Although they never grow completely
accustomed to it, they are able to assume an attitude of meditated
levity: “[S]ome [neighbors] smile in silence, on the verge of a joke,
because in spite of the bullets and splashes of blood there is always
someone who laughs and makes the rest laugh, at the expense of
death and the disappearance” (131). The villagers acknowledge the
gravity of the situation, but they also joke about it.
138 Lot t e Buiting
Although it is not my intention to carry out a full comparison

between both the texts, I do wish to point to a number of other paral-
lels between El coronel and Los ejércitos, including structure, themes,
and motives, and the extradiegetic political urgency of the text. A first
list of similarities would have to include the elderly and sick protago-
nist who, for the duration of the novel, waits for a letter that never
arrives; the dependence of the protagonist on his spouse for survival;
the setting of both novels in small town, rural Colombia; the rooster
with economic currency in El coronel that turns into a hen with equal
value in Los ejércitos; and the multiple characters that, in both novels,
inhabit the gray zone between life and death. A salient difference
between both novels is narratological: the omniscient narrator in El
coronel has disappeared in Rosero’s first person narration.
In both novels, the wait dominates all or most of the text, although
its nature could not be more different. The colonel stubbornly waits
for the remuneration to which he is entitled, with the full aware-
ness that in all likelihood it will not arrive. This attitude expresses
hopefulness, while it also raises the pressing issue of poverty. His
wife reprimands him: “You were also entitled to the veteran’s pension
after risking your neck in the civil war. Now everyone has his future
assured and you’re dying of hunger, completely alone” (60). Yet the
colonel’s naive and unquestioning belief in the government’s pension
is precisely due to his military involvement in the war. He risked his
life for an ideal of the nation-state that was then still in the process of
consolidation. Therefore, even though the colonel’s forlorn situation
evokes the damage caused by the government, which fails to carry
out its promises to its citizens (Rueda, La violencia 112), the colonel
holds fast to the promise and to his legal rights. Even though daily life
has shown him that the hard-won rights are practically void, he does
not question them. After all, his identity as the colonel keeps him tied
to his wartime activities. He thus actively seeks out the postmaster
on Fridays, observing his every move Argus-eyed, although time and
again he experiences the same “anguished uneasiness” (12).
Ismael’s attitude to the wait, by contrast, is indirect. He never
mentions that he waits for a note from the kidnappers, but he rest-
lessly wanders about—his gravely injured knee notwithstanding. First
he walks around town to locate Otilia, and when it has become clear
that she has, indeed, disappeared, Ismael continues his walks to fill
the days that in her absence have become meaningless. Moreover, the
meanders serve to connect him with the other townspeople, many of
whom find themselves in similar situations. While the colonel explic-
itly philosophizes about his letter, Ismael expresses his concern for
communication in a mediated way, referring to his friends and neigh-

bors who inquire whether he has heard “[a]ny word” (131) about his
wife. Ismael himself has lost any aptitude for practical matters due
to Otilia’s absence, and instead of worrying about a note that would
enable her return, he cannot think nor do anything: “Your world may
not have ended, but mine has” (132). Furthermore, Ismael does not
share the colonel’s sense of entitlement to his letter, for he knows that
the kidnappers owe him nothing. In Rosero’s San José the govern-
ment fails its citizens lamentably, because they withdraw all forms of
protection and medical care from the town. San José thus turns into
a no-man’s-land of sorts, up for grabs for the paramilitary or guerilla
army. Most inhabitants accept this development stoically and draw
the only viable conclusion: they must leave. Ismael refuses to follow
their example: “God, I am staying. I stay because only here can I find
you, Otilia, only here can I wait for you, and if you do not come, you
do not come, but I am staying here” (202).15 In “Beyond Human
Rights” Giorgio Agamben explains how the decline of the nation-
state leads to the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical
categories (90). In turning San José over to the armies, the govern-
ment effectively strips Ismael of any rights he once had as a citizen,
for even though in theory he still inhabits Colombian territory, in all
terms practical he now lives nowhere.16
Despite the conspicuous difference in duration of the wait—the
colonel’s is stretched out over fifty-six years, Ismael’s lasts for several
months—its effect on both men is very similar.17 It wears them out
completely, leading them to the edge of physical and mental collapse.
Thus, in El coronel the main character and his wife are withering away:
“We’re rotting alive” (6). Their rooster provides them a small respite,
because the animal constitutes a reminder of their murdered son and
their sole hope of income, once it starts fighting. However, feeding him
a few grains of corn necessitates a day of fasting for themselves. Each
day is a struggle for survival, and yet, with the final exchange between
the colonel and his wife, the novella ends on a slightly higher note.
The colonel’s wife insists on the question of what they will eat: “It had
taken the colonel seventy-five years—the seventy-five years of his life,
minute by minute—to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invin-
cible at the moment when he replied: ‘Shit.’ ” (62). Although he does
not exactly paint a bright picture for the future, his humorous reply
and positive feelings nonetheless manifest his optimistic attitude.
Indeed, the last paragraph reveals much about the novel and the
colonel himself, who throughout the text has maintained his sense
of dignity, both in physical appearance and linguistic expression. He
140 Lot t e Buiting
has a particular distaste for cursing: “ ‘Goddamn it, Colonel.’ He was

startled. ‘No need to swear,’ he said” (33).18 Hence, it is surprising
that the colonel would express his feelings of purity and invincibility
with a profanity. According to René Prieto, “the . . . final section of the
novella, immediately following the scene in which the hero is meta-
phorically ‘swallowed and expelled,’ opens with a complete reversal
of all previous premises. . . . The pain of waiting is over, even if waiting
itself is not” (36–37). Even his intestinal flora, which had plagued
him throughout the novella, is alleviated in the end: “He felt well.
December had shriveled the flora in his gut” (53). The utterance of the
word “shit” therefore signifies a small, yet liberating transgression.
In Los ejércitos the process of human decay is much more rapid and
complete. Ismael almost instantly loses interest in everything around
him. The loss of Otilia has consumed his every thought and emo-
tion to such an extent, that he seems to be mourning her death. But
Ismael cannot truly mourn Otilia’s death, because he cultivates the
hope that she might still be alive.19 Furthermore, even though all
circumstances indicate that she was kidnapped by one of the armies,
he cannot even be sure of that. Therefore, he quickly transforms
into a melancholic. In fact, the distinction between melancholia and
mourning is subtle, but it entails major differences for the individual’s
ego. Whereas mourning is the “normal” reaction to the loss of a loved
one, with melancholia the process of mourning transforms into a nar-
cissistic mental disorder. Freud explains:
Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to

the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one . . . The
distinguishing features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejec-
tion, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to
love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feel-
ings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revil-
ings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment . . . The
melancholic represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any
achievement and morally despicable . . . This picture of a delusion of
(mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to
take nourishment. (243–246)
Ismael displays all these characteristics of melancholia; his degen-

eration is physical (he does not eat or sleep much and neglects his
personal hygiene), material (he could care less about his house or
belongings), emotional (he starts to have fits of nervous laughter),
and sensorial (at times he neither sees nor hears properly). Finally, it
is also moral. When it appears that Geraldina’s son has fallen into an
empty pool, she rushes to find him. Ismael stays behind: “I did not
follow her: another would have, not me, not any more: what for?”
(184). Ismael’s pain and despair about Otilia’s absence and the fate
that might have befallen her are further complicated by his profound
sense of guilt. He is tormented by the idea that he is to blame for
Otilia’s disappearance. After the town’s exodus, his daughter appears
before him as a projection of his imagination. Addressing her, Ismael
says: “I hope . . . that you forgive the only one guilty of the disappear-
ance of your mother, because I left her on her own” (207).
This remark from Ismael to his absent daughter is suggestive, for
it makes explicit the question of guilt, which figures significantly in
Los ejércitos, even though its presence largely remains latent. Guilt is
related not only to the characters, but also in the absent forces like
the government—guilty of forsaking its citizens—and the armies—
guilty of inflicting violence.20 What instigates the guilt that Ismael
feels? His explanation, “I left her on her own” (207) seems hardly
plausible, for how can he inculpate himself for not being with Otilia
when the armies attacked San José? Is he guilty for being absent? That
sense of guilt might more readily be attributed to the government.
Ismael’s melancholic, self-deprecating comments manifest his guilty
conscience. Similarly, according to Héctor Hoyos, “guilt is not repre-
sented in ethical or religious terms, as one might expect, but through
affective reactions: [Ismael] humiliates himself in his interior mono-
logue, and he goes out for walks despite his injured knee” (“Visión
desafectada” 285–286). Those affective reactions are both symptoms
of his melancholia, and of his larger sense of culpability.
Karl Jaspers’s case study of the “question of German guilt” can shed
some light on the issue.21 Jaspers distinguishes between four concepts
of guilt: criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical (25–26). The
consequences of these types of guilt are, respectively, punishment,
liability, penance and renewal, and transformation of human self-
consciousness before God (30). According to Jaspers’s schema, criminal
guilt in Los ejércitos lies with the kidnappers, whereas Ismael’s sense of
guilt has a moral or metaphysical character. These two latter types of
guilt “are understood only by the individual in his community, [and]
are by their very nature not atoned for. They do not cease. Whoever
bears them enters upon a process lasting all his life” (111). When
Ismael finds out that Marcos, kidnapped two years prior, was actu-
ally killed shortly after his disappearance, he says: “Another death, by
force. To the shame of the living” (177). Essentially, Ismael’s guilt is
mainly metaphysical, which Jaspers describes as the guilt “of being
alive” (66).22 After Ismael has acknowledged his guilt and shame for
142 Lot t e Buiting
being alive, “[t]he vision of Otilia vanishes, leaving a bitter trace on

my tongue” (207). That is the last time he mentions her. He wanders
off to his house, walking into his death.
Death is not only the heavily implied ending of both novels, but
it also permeates the texts in the form of the violent deaths of friends
and loved ones, and it sneaks up on the protagonists themselves.
The colonel is described as “nothing but skin and bones” (29) by
his wife, who “appeared at the door, ghostlike” (61), as if she had
already passed to the other side. Thomas Anderson has stressed the
importance of death in this novella and points to its insistent appear-
ance in different guises. The colonel’s wife especially, chronically ill
of asthma and herself convinced that she is about to pass away, seems
to waver between the states of life and death (Anderson 72). Like the
colonel’s wife, Ismael inhabits the borderlands between life and death,
not only because he himself feels like his life has come to a full stop,
but also through the mediations of the townspeople. First it is just
Hey, the mad empanada seller, who asks him: “Profesor . . . they didn’t
kill you while you slept?” (187, emphasis added). Though this joke
strikes Ismael as cruel, it nonetheless amuses him. However, it quickly
appears that he is marked by death, or by trouble, which amounts
to much the same. Ismael’s name is on a mysterious list, and every-
one believes that he has been assassinated. His friend Celmiro repeats
Hey’s question verbatim (192), and even Ismael himself believes that
he is already dead. He finds himself on the street in the midst of the
last, ruthless attack on San José, while soldiers are ravaging the town,
shooting at anyone and everyone. Realizing he has nowhere to hide,
Ismael curls up into a ball, “pretending to be dead, I pretend to be
dead, I am dead, I am not asleep, it really is as though my own heart
were not beating, I do not even close my eyes: I leave them wide
open” (197). It works. In the startling next scene, the very soldiers
who believed him to be dead stumble upon him again—surprised,
much like the townspeople, to see him alive. They question his status—
Is he dead? Alive? A saint?—and when Ismael flees the scene “with
exasperating slowness” (199) they shoot at him twice: “The bullet
whistles past just above my head; and then another, which hits the
ground, centimetres from my shoe” (200). Ismael appears to be able
to willfully control his wanderings through the shadowy terrain of
death, and this apparent capacity to negotiate with death continues
to protect him until the novel’s last paragraph.
Ismael’s dangerous flirtation with death seems to be induced by
the death drive, not because he entertains an unconscious wish to
die but because the death drive propels him to strive for an almost
complete cessation of tension—very similar to death, but not death

proper. Freud significantly posits the death-drive “beyond the plea-
sure principle,” as a further elaboration, not a contradiction or nega-
tion, of the pleasure principle. Teresa De Lauretis defines the pleasure
principle as the “tendency of the psychic apparatus to remove exces-
sive excitation, which is felt as unpleasure or even pain, and so pro-
duce the sense of relief that is felt as pleasure or satisfaction” (21).
Likewise, the death-drive cultivates the absence of unpleasure, aims
for a state of inertia, or, in Rowland Smith’s formulation: “[W]hat
the death-drive does is to preserve, in the midst of death, a leastness,
a less than being that is more than nothing” (9). De Lauretis insists
that “all drives are powered by libidinal energy, all drives are of a
sexual nature” (23)— even the death drive. This sexual nature of the
drives is blatantly apparent in Ismael, who displays a constant sexual
desire for the young women he encounters, especially his neighbor
Geraldina. His wife reproaches him for it and he also scorns himself,
but as he falls deeper and deeper into his melancholic state, his erotic
desire remains intact. This intensifies the guilt he already feels about
his wife’s disappearance, because his own sexual desire disturbs him
as inappropriate. However, although it exacerbates his guilt, it also
forms a powerful force of survival.
Paradoxically, the (libidinal) energy enables him to stay alive, but it
is also Ismael’s erotic interest in Geraldina that leads him into the final
scene, and ultimately to his death. Anxious “to locate Geraldina, and
locate her, most of all, alive” (212), he approaches her house. What
he encounters is a monstrous rape scene, which epitomizes the work-
ings of the death drive—not because Geraldina’s dead body becomes
the source of sexual pleasure for the men raping her, but because of
the effect it has on Ismael. He thinks he detects in himself a fleeting
flicker of lust, which repulses him. For the briefest of moments, he
imagines himself understanding the impulse that led the soldiers to
act they way they do:
Between the arms of a wicker rocking chair, was . . . Geraldina naked,

her head lolling from side to side, and on top of her one of the men
embracing her, one of the men delving into Geraldina, one of the men
was raping her: it still took me a while to realize it was Geraldina’s
corpse . . . Why do you not join them, Ismael? I listen to myself demean
myself: why do you not explain to them how to rape a corpse? Or
how to love? Is that not what you dreamt of? And I see myself lying
in wait for Geraldina’s naked corpse, the nakedness of the corpse that
still glows, imitating perfectly what could be Geraldina’s passionate
embrace. (213–214)
144 Lot t e Buiting
His understanding comes to him in the form of self-admonition; he

aggressively forces himself to imagine his partaking in the atrocious
scene. Ismael is once again plagued by guilt. His account of the rape
of Geraldina’s dead body is reminiscent of a moment in the past in
which he objectified her, a moment in which he, indeed, imagined
Geraldina in a sequence of sexual engagements, leading up to a
sadistic—and therefore pleasurable—repeated death: “yes, she shouts,
and I hear her, she wants to be looked at, admired, pursued, caught,
turned over, bitten and licked, killed, revived and killed again for gen-
erations” (29). He has imagined and therefore, according to his guilty
conscience, willed the scene he witnesses. This realization— “Is that
not what you dreamt of?”—leaves him feeling utterly inhuman. He
no longer admits to even having a name (215), for he has become a
passive participant in the atrocities that led Otilia to exclaim: “There
is no name for it” (52).23 After having witnessed Geraldina’s rape,
Ismael enters a state that closely resembles the death drive’s aim; when
he walks out of the house, an almost complete cessation of tensions
overcomes him. He no longer fears, he desires nothing but nothing-
ness itself—something he articulates as “sleep.”
In the final scene, Ismael channels the guilt that torments him
into one final, suicidal gesture. He leaves Geraldina’s house and walks
toward his own, when he is stopped:
“Your name,” they shout, “or you’re finished.”

Let it be finished, I only wanted, what did I want?
To go inside and sleep.
Your name, they repeat.
What am I going to tell them? My name? Another name? I shall tell
them I am Jesus Christ, I shall tell them I am Simón Bolívar, I shall tell
them I am called Nobody, I shall tell them I have no name and I shall
laugh again; they will think I am mocking them and they will shoot:
this is how it will be. (215)
Is it appropriate to speak of a “suicidal gesture” when circumstances

have dictated Ismael’s behavior, and when it is not actually Ismael
who ends his own life? I think it is, and the text seems to corrobo-
rate this idea. The second time Ismael encounters the soldiers on the
street, one of them yells: “That’s what I’m starting to like about you,
old man: you don’t tremble. But now I know why. You’re not capable
of shooting yourself, are you? You want us to kill you, to do you that
favour. And we’re not going to give you that pleasure, now, are we?”
(200). Ismael’s suicidal impulse is ultimately the result of his mel-
ancholia. The analyses of melancholia helped Freud to understand
the nature of suicide, and lead him to the same conclusion found in
Rosero’s novel: death imposed onto the self. The loss of the ego is,
essentially, what enables any individual to commit suicide, which, as
Freud quips, is “psychologically very remarkable” (246).24 In Ismael’s
case, what causes the ego-loss is not the identification of the ego with
the lost object, but his tremendous feelings of guilt.25 Throughout
the course of the novel they have led him to develop such intense
contempt for himself that his ego treats “itself” as “other” and kills
itself, the self-preservational force of the drives notwithstanding
(Freud 252). I therefore believe that Ismael’s final gesture is properly
suicidal. Even though Ismael will not execute his own death sentence,
he manipulates the circumstances in such a way that his death is the
only possible outcome.
The closing paragraph of Los ejércitos is remarkable not only for
the way in which it skirts suicide and murder, but also for its engage-
ment with the long literary tradition of the “name” Nobody.26 Ismael
inverses Ulysses’s ingenious trick to fool the Cyclops Polyphemus
in order to survive, and turns it into a manipulation of the soldiers
with the intention of getting killed. The narrative perspective of the
novel’s final paragraph, moreover, reframes the entire novel. From
which position does the narrator talk, if he can narrate the immi-
nence of his own death? For this reason, Mabel Moraña considers
the novel as a “pseudo-autobiographical story” (190), told “from an
impossible position that the text never explains” (192). This leads
her to examine the novel in light of the process of Ismael’s writing,
even though Rosero’s text nowhere posits Ismael as a writer. Rather
than considering the narratological point of view as a paradox in want
of an explanation that the text itself does not provide, I think it is
more productive to consider the very impossibility of Ismael’s speak-
ing position.
I contend that the impossibility of narration, and the nonhuman-
ity that Ismael experiences and confronts, are inextricably related.
Drawing on Agamben, I propose to construe the figure of Ismael as
the impossible, true witness.27 In The Remnants of Auschwitz (1998),
Agamben theorizes the (im)possibility of bearing witness in relation
to language. The women and men in the Nazi concentration camps
that inhabited “the extreme threshold between life and death” (47)
were referred to as Muselmänner. On the one hand, the Muselmann
is the nonhuman, the one who could never bear witness, while at the
same time the one who cannot bear witness is the true witness (150).
A survivor can never tell the complete story of Auschwitz, because
that story ends in death. The testimony of witnesses—survivors
146 Lot t e Buiting
from Auschwitz—depends on the very limit that the Muselmann

constitutes:
Precisely insofar as it [testimony] inheres in language as such, pre-

cisely insofar as it bears witness to the taking place of a potentiality of
speaking through an impotentiality alone, its authority depends not
on a factual truth, a conformity between something said and a fact or
between memory and what happened, but rather on the immemorial
relation between the unsayable and the sayable, between the outside
and the inside of language. (157–158)
Before Ismael becomes a witness, another survivor-witness makes his

appearance: his neighbors’ young son, Eusebito. After having been
kidnapped along with his father and Gracielita, Eusebito unexpect-
edly returns one day, mute. He does not seem to recognize anyone,
and refuses to talk, until Ismael asks him about Gracielita, the young
maid and Eusebito’s playmate: “Then he says, as if he had learned it
by heart: ‘My daddy told me to tell you that we should both leave here
that you should gather everything up and not wait one day that’s what
my daddy told me to tell you’ ” (160, italics in original). Eusebito does
not testify to what he himself has experienced, but rather transmits
his father’s words, thus literalizing the situation in which the sur-
vivor has to speak on behalf of the one who cannot bear witness.
Furthermore, those few words mask many others that are not being
spoken, but that implicitly resonate in the message: his father and
Gracielita will not come back, and Geraldina and Eusebito have rea-
son to fear for their lives. Eusebito’s own relationship to language
can be restored only after he has delivered his father’s message—now
he can speak again.
In one instance, Ismael displays a similar reaction to Eusebito’s.
A camera crew comes to San José to report on the effects of the ongo-
ing drug war, and they wish to interview Ismael. He has just saved
several children who were playing with an unexploded grenade with-
out realizing it, by throwing the explosive over the edge of a cliff.
Ismael, however, refuses to be pushed into the role of momentary
hero, to appear on television as a witness to the atrocities committed
by the armies. Utterly confused by the presence of the camera and
the attractive journalist in his home, he thinks: “I do not want to
listen, I make an effort to understand her, she is simply carrying out
her work, she could be my own daughter working, but she could not
be my daughter, I do not want to speak nor can I” (140). Instead, he
points to his mouth, indicating that he is mute. Why is he incapable
of speech? To Ismael, the presence of this beautiful woman and her
cameraman is unsettling, as they seem “otherworldly” to him (140).

Moreover, anything he could say would be insufficient and would
contribute to the disturbing news coverage that reports on kidnapped
dogs, instead of human suffering.
The novel’s final words narrate Ismael’s death by anticipation—
“this is how it will be” (215)—and thereby place Ismael in an impos-
sible speaking position. Yet that very impossibility is precisely what
bearing witness entails. He does not narrate the actual moment of
his death and as such, his account is the only possible way to construe
death, namely as a rhetorical promise. Robert Rowland Smith asserts
that, like death, promise does not pertain to the time of actuality (42).
Furthermore, Ismael’s speaking position is located in the same place
as death—which is certainly not to say that he speaks from death—as
a perpetual (im)possiblity: “On account of never being actualized the
possibility of death is effectively a perpetual possibility; but insofar as it
is also the perpetual possibility of death, the last thing it can be is per-
petual, for it must die. We are forced to think the possibility of death
as perpetual and finite at the same time” (Rowland Smith 38). In Los
ejércitos Rosero gives aesthetic expression to this aporia. The gram-
matical tenses of the last page lead to a convergence of temporalities—
past, present, and future tenses. This essentially creates a nontemporal
state that is reinforced by the flow of the last paragraph, and that
culminates in the articulation of his death—a linguistic expression
that precedes the “actual” death.28 Thus, this linguistic-temporal
convergence recreates the eternal promise of death, which is, at the
same time, finite: Ismael’s death and the end of the novel. Ismael finds
himself on the threshold between life and death, between time and
nontime, between language and silence. And with his impossible tes-
timony, he bears witness to the atrocities of the army.
Rosero’s Los ejércitos folds itself comfortably and unabashedly into
traditions like the Boom, while its literary proposal reveals a changed
social, historical, and literary climate. Without the need to proclaim
with grandiloquent statements that his novels are stridently modern,
have cracked open tradition, and reversed backward editorial policies,
Los ejércitos is its own best manifesto. Since La Violencia, Colombian
literature has shown different approaches to representing violence,
of which García Márquez’s El coronel, with its elusive violence that is
almost palpable in the short novel’s atmosphere, is one of the most
widely read examples. In Los ejércitos violence has become so all-
encompassing that neither narrating its consequences, as in El coro-
nel, nor eroticizing its representation, as frequently occurs in novels
contemporary to Rosero’s, seem sufficient. Los ejércitos is, first and
148 Lot t e Buiting
foremost, the attempt not to represent violence, but to bear witness to

it. The constitution of Ismael as the impossible witness testifies to the
sheer impossibility of this attempt.
Notes
1. I am alluding to the opening sentence of Cien años de soledad: “Many
years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía
was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to
discover ice” (1).
2. Much has been written on the Boom generation. One of the best
accounts, which takes into consideration different approximations, is
Ángel Rama’s “El boom en perspectiva” (“The Boom in Perspective”),
which unfortunately has not yet been translated into English. For a
critical evaluation in English, see the Cambridge History of Latin
American Literature: Volume 2 (226–279). The four Boom writ-
ers that appear in any account—while other names may vary—are
Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario
Vargas Llosa.
3. See, for example, Fuentes (291–377); Pellón (279–282; 301–302);
Regalado López (144; 147–148).
4. However, several works that are considered to be Post-Boom are actu-
ally written by Boom writers, for example Gabriel García Márquez’s
El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975). See
Pellón.
5. The five authors of the Manifesto are Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz,
Ignacio Padilla, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, and Jorge Volpi. In his
account of the Crack, Carlos Fuentes cites another list: Volpi, Palou,
Padilla, Urroz, and Rivera Garza (361).
6. This and other translations of Spanish language texts are mine, unless
otherwise noted in the bibliography.
7. The Crack shrewdly tweaks Cortázar’s sexist nomenclature, because
Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) does not exactly propose gender-neutral
“active participation,” as Sharkey explains: “Oliveira’s contempt for
La Maga’s mode of reading anticipates the basic theoretical premise
of the notorious second book of the novel: that there are two kinds
of reader, the ‘female-reader,’ who reads a book passively, a mere wit-
ness to the creative production of the author, and the ‘active-reader’
or ‘reader-accomplice,’ who consciously participates in the creation
of the novel he reads” (78).
8. In the “Presentation” to McOndo the editors do not reveal names,
but it has by now become common knowledge that the anecdote
is based on Fuguet’s personal experiences. See, for example, “I am
not a magical realist”: “I . . . wanted [to] get published in the States,
the home of so many writers and artists who had inspired me”
(Fuguet).
9. Although, for the sake of their argument, the writers of McOndo

and Crack largely ignore their presence, they are well aware of the
achievements of those writers. Jorge Volpi, for one, makes a point of
positioning Roberto Bolaño as the direct product of the Boom when
he writes in his “almost tweet” 51: “Due to its architecture and its
narrative ambition, The Salvage Detectives and 2666 are direct heirs
of One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Green House, Terra Nostra or
Hopscotch” (Volpi). To cite “narrative ambition” and “architecture”
as the inextricable link between the Boom and Bolaño seems arbi-
trary at best.
10. In point of fact, Rosero himself refuses to answer questions regarding
authorial influences. In an interview with Nuria Hurta, he asserts:
“As far as authors and influences go, I leave that to the critics. Let
them get that wrong” (Hurta 8).
11. The question is complicated, and due to the nature of this chapter
I can merely sketch the outlines of the debates. For recent accounts,
see, for example, María Helena Rueda “Dislocaciones y otras vio-
lencias en el circuito transnacional de la literatura latinoamericana”
(2009) and La violencia y sus huellas: Una mirada desde la narra-
tiva colombiana (2011); Héctor Hoyos “García Márquez’s Sublime
Violence and the Eclipse of Colombian Literature” (2006); or
Rory O’Brien Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary
Colombian Culture: Spectres of La Violencia (2008).
12. Hoyos, “Sublime Violence” 5–7. For example, Eduardo Caballero
Calderón with Manuel Pacho (1962) or Hernando Téllez’s and
Manuel Mejía Vallejo’s short stories.
13. The schematization into cycles is based on Rueda (La violencia
28–33).
14. On the one hand, the word “sicaresque” plays with a literary genre from
the Golden Age, “picaresque,” and, on the other, with “sicario”—a
hired assassin, almost without exception a teen or adolescent. Jorge
Franco, anthologized in McOndo, is one of the well-known authors
associated with the sicaresque, his novel Rosario Tijeras (1999) being
one of its prime examples.
15. Otilia’s abduction causes someone else to wait for a letter that will
never arrive: their daughter María. Since Otilia can no longer write
to María, and Ismael does not know how to break the news of her
mother’s disappearance to her, he refrains from answering María’s
nine letters.
16. Agamben suggests that the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable
figure in which one may see the coming of a new political commu-
nity, once the dissolution of the nation-state is complete. Drawing
on Hannah Arendt he explains that, as the one figure who needs to
embody human rights most, the refugee actually marks the crisis of
the concept (Beyond 92). Curiously, Ismael marks the crisis of the
same concept from an opposite angle: by refusing to leave (i.e., to
150 Lot t e Buiting
become a refugee in his own country) he illustrates the limits of what

human rights of the nation-state can actually achieve.
17. The translation reads “For nearly sixty years” (3), whereas the Spanish
has “Durante cincuenta y seis años” (49).
18. In Spanish, García Márquez uses the same word in both instances:
“Mierda” (100, 151).
19. When Freud compares melancholia to mourning, this is one of the
first features he mentions: “The object has not perhaps actually died,
but has been lost as an object of love” (245).
20. Although I believe an analysis of the larger question of guilt is war-
ranted, in this chapter I will limit myself to the specific case of the
guilt that affects the characters.
21. Jaspers’s analysis of guilt was instigated by postwar German society
in the 1950s, and perhaps it is overly schematic; however, his analysis
aptly demonstrates the need to distinguish between different forms
of guilt, both as experienced by the individual, and as a category of
judgment by a second party.
22. Sergio Chejfec expresses a very similar feeling in his novel Los plan-
etas (The Planets, 1999): “This arbitrary act of evil grieved us as
though we were his kin and left us in his debt. M was our martyr, not
because his sacrifice was intended to bring about our salvation, but
because we were marked by his death” (10).
23. Translation emended, to reflect the “name” in the original: “Eso no
tiene nombre” (56).
24. One of the characteristics of melancholia is “an overcoming of the
instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life” (Freud
246).
25. After successful mourning, the libido is detached from the lost object
and can be displaced onto another object. However, in melancholia—
“pathological mourning” (250)—this does not happen: “The free
libido was not displaced onto another object; it was withdrawn into
the ego. There . . . it served to establish an identification of the ego
with the abandoned object . . . In this way an object-loss was trans-
formed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the
loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego
and the ego as altered by identification” (Freud 249), which repre-
sents a regression to the original narcissistic phase.
26. In this chapter I focus on the Latin American literary tradition.
However, Rosero engages in interesting ways with other tradi-
tions as well, as evinced in his novel’s closing paragraph, but also,
for example, in the choice to give his protagonist the biblical name
Ismael.
27. In positing Ismael as “true witness” I by no means wish to suggest
that his status is comparable to that of the Muselmann, which is
comparable to nothing or no one. Rather, I am interested in the
(im)possibility of bearing witness.
28. The English translation has not maintained the flow of the last para-
graph. Throughout the novel, Anne McLean consistently cleans up,
so to speak, the less neatly organized Spanish syntax. In Spanish,
everything that comes after “I have left by the front door” (215) is
one long sentence. The choice to break up the sentence and to order
the page layout is unfortunate, because that long, seemingly unend-
ing last sentence is illustrative of the protagonist’s state of mind.
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(1988): 7–8.
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http://www.nexos.com.mx/
Chapter 7
The Narco-Letrado: Intellectuals and

Drug Trafficking in Darío Jaramillo
Agudelo’s Cartas cruzadas
Alberto Fonseca
C olombian narco-narratives clearly show the divergence of neoliber-

alism, globalization, and repressive policies in the fight against drugs.
On the one hand, the turn-of-the-century narco-narratives represent
a capitalist logic, which sees in drug trafficking an economic dynamic
of supply and demand that follows the directives of the market. On
the other hand, this body of texts criticizes consumer practices that
the same capitalist system engenders. In Colombia, the business of
drug trafficking produced changes in the social and economic sphere,
contributing to the emergence of a new value scale in which easy
money and consumption impacted the way individuals think about
their future. These factors also enter into dialogue with traditional
social values, like hard work and study. This chapter studies Jaramillo
Agudelo’s use of the figure of the intellectual in his fiction with the
aim of understanding the position the lettered city has taken in the
face of the drug trafficking phenomenon. Agudelo’s Cartas cruzadas
(Exchanged Letters, 1995) signals the loss of position that the letrados
suffer as guides in a neoliberal society and victims of narcotraffick-
ing, and their transformation into what one might call neo-letrados.
By putting the changes that intellectuals have recently experienced in
Latin America in a historical context, it is possible to better under-
stand the nature and function of the neo-letrado in this novel. In
Cartas cruzadas, a historical generation is analyzed through the pro-
tagonists’ desire to acquire wealth. Jaramillo Agudelo uses different
narrative strategies and novelistic forms—like the autobiographical
style and epistolary genres, respectively—to textually portray the
intricacies of how drug trafficking has affected the discourse of the
154 Alberto Fonseca
nation and its structures in Colombia. Employing the figure of the

neo-letrado, the novel portrays the lack of career opportunities, soci-
ety’s changing views on employment and on the meaning of personal
success, and the prevailing value of money in Colombian society.
The development of narco-narrative in Colombia covers three
decades, beginning with the important changes affecting drug traf-
ficking from the 1970s to the 1990s. Narco-narratives appear at the
end of the 1970s in conjunction with the historical establishment
of the cocaine mafias.1 In that decade, Colombia experienced a new
adjustment of the drug market with a shift from marijuana to cocaine.
The economic gains and the connections that drug traffickers gradu-
ally established with politics and old wealth drove a new type of social
reorganization in the midst of serious political and economic crises.
Unequal distribution of wealth, social exclusion, urban violence and
corruption in political institutions constituted the definitive charac-
teristics of Colombia during the last decades of the twentieth century
(Reguillo 51–68; Rotker 1–6). This climate of political and economic
instability marks a rise in criminal and drug activity at the same time
that it signals new ways of confronting social and moral crises. In
the 1980s, a new type of society emerged in which the processes of
social mobility and ascent gained new value in the drug trafficking
society. Excluded social sectors saw in drug trafficking the possibil-
ity of accessing levels of consumption previously inaccessible to them
(Barbero, “La ciudad” 20; Salazar, Cola 83–92). At the same time,
those with old money found themselves gradually displaced by the
entrance of new wealth, which, with its power of acquisition, pen-
etrated the various levels of society. In the 1990s, with the fall of
the great drug lords, like Pablo Escobar in 1993, cultural products
underwent yet another change in their approach to representing drug
trafficking and its effect on society.
Colombian criticism has principally emphasized the topic of the
sicarios or contract killers when studying narco-narratives. Cultural
critics such as Héctor Abad Faciolince, Maite Villoria, and María
Mercedes Jaramillo have noticed that Colombian writers are becom-
ing increasingly interested in the literary representation of young
assassins for hire in Medellin. Faciolince has given the name “sicar-
esca” to this type of literature and has identified a few structural
characteristics of these texts, among them the use of first person
narrative and the authors’ tolerant view of their protagonists’ actions.
However, in addition to the sicaresca genre there is also a group of
narco-narratives that employ as their main character intellectuals or
members of the lettered elite who find an escape in drug trafficking.
T h e Na r c o - L e t r a d o 155
To the latter group belongs Darío Jaramillo Agudelo’s Cartas cruza-

das. His novel focuses on the life of the main character, Luis, and his
transformation from intellectual to drug trafficker.2 The protago-
nists’ set of values shift after experiencing the polluting effect that
the criminal economy has on the legal one. The real possibility of
acquiring wealth overnight affects the social fabric and generates a
new class that boasts its symbols of power. Luis ends up acquiring
goods that he is not able to enjoy because, after counting money by
the kilos, his life feels empty: Luis loses his girlfriend as well as all of
his friends, and later disappears. The main character’s destiny sym-
bolizes the collapse of a society transformed by the greed of a popu-
lation seeking quick and easy money. Jaramillo Agudelo’s novel has
received little critical attention. Donald Shaw’s article, in which the
critic classifies the book as an example of the literary and commercial
movement known as the Post-Boom, deserves attention. Shaw bases
his classification of Agudelo’s text on the presence of four character-
istics: the theme of love, open criticism of Colombian society, the
subordination of formal experimentation to social protest, and the
presence of “strong” female characters. Shaw also notices the rela-
tionship that the text establishes between the decay of Colombian
society and the collapse of the personal relationships between Luis
and those who surround him. From Shaw’s point of view, Luis has
sacrificed not only his moral integrity but also his girlfriend’s love
through his connection with drug trafficking. Diana Romero has
also identified “love” as a recurring motif throughout the novel. In
her review, Romero points out that love is an intrinsic characteristic
of the epistolary genre. Love occupies the foreground, in apparent
homage to the epistolary genre: on the one hand there is the solid,
profound, and passionate love of Raquel and Luis; on the other, there
is the love as physical obsession and permanent desire of Esteban
toward the young women of the bars and hotels; the fraternal love
between Raquel and her sister Claudia; Doña Graciela’s motherly
love. However, the principal actor in this correspondence is the love
toward friends and the strong union that forms a support circle and
an understanding among the characters (143).
While for Shaw and Romero, love becomes the main character-
istic in Jaramillo’s novel, at the same time, both critics emphasize
the impact of how new values modify the notion of “love.” From a
formal point of view, Shaw and Romero also offer keys to understand
Jaramillo’s novel. For Romero, the epistolary genre becomes a liter-
ary device that allows readers to see the perspective of each of the
characters and discover the effect of illegal activities on the characters’
156 Alberto Fonseca
subjectivities. For Shaw, the text is a “declarative” novel about the

actions and reactions of a group of friends in a society dominated by
a new economy:
Here we are not called upon to puzzle out or “crack” the meaning
of the novel. We are deliberately granted direct insight into the char-
acters’ actions and reactions. As Jaramillo himself points out: “it is
necessary for the reader of the epistolary novel, as a part of his/her
pleasure, to feel oneself an authentic violator of the correspondence,
that one be possessed by the irresistible sensation of invading the inti-
macy of personal stories.” (33)
Thus, through the reading of the letters exchanged by various youth,

Jaramillo’s fiction describes the processes of emotional and economic
transformation that Colombian society experienced in the 1980s.
At the end of the novel, the characters recognize the gradual decay
of all aspects of society and the impossibility of escaping from their
historical time.3 The neo-letrados are the new configuration of the
intellectual in a transnational society that has fallen victim to drug
trafficking: they live within the context of the drug culture and often
analyze or discuss its effect on their lives. The letrados are privileged
subjects who perceive social changes and the loss of values. Luis (a lit-
erature professor), Raquel (a photo journalist), and Esteban (a news
reporter and poet), each represent a specific type of letrado. Raquel
and Esteban are neo-letrados of the media society and new forms of
technology and Luis is a letrado who works in a private university and
gradually loses his position after he decides to search for more profit-
able forms of income. As the novel develops, Esteban seeks to deci-
pher the reasons for the personality changes of his childhood friend,
Luis, with the aim of discovering the new set of values his fellow
countrymen are embracing: “Luis did not want to continue being
poor. He had to raise money” (260). Luis’s own neo-letrado views
about social changes are portrayed through his epistolary exchange
with Esteban and Raquel. In his letters, Luis reveals his desire to get
rich and to find in the world of illegal activities an option for a bet-
ter life. Taking advantage of the epistolary genre structure, the novel
gradually reconstructs the emotive, cultural, and economic contra-
dictions of the 1970s in Medellin, emphasizing the transformation of
a supposedly thriving and traditional region into moral and economic
disorder. The novel also explores the transformation of the axiology
and social structures of Colombia in the microcosms of the group
of friends. The epistolary genre—a social heteroglossia that includes
the voices of all the different characters who attempt to make sense
of Luis’s transformation from professor to drug trafficker—invites
the reader to examine the influence of the illegal drug economy on
Colombian society and especially on individuals who, despite their
educated position, cannot escape the lure of overnight wealth.
Cartas cruzadas is divided into fourteen chapters, each containing
letter exchanges among Raquel, Luis, and Esteban who are seeking to
establish and understand the changes that Luis has undergone. Their
exchange, which begins with a letter that Luis writes to his friend
Esteban telling him he is in love with Raquel, occupy a chronologi-
cal space of twelve years (1971–1983). An important plot element is
a long letter Raquel sends to her friend Juana in 1983, in which she
mentions her decision to travel to New York. The contrast of Raquel’s
letter in the present and the letters exchanged in the past record the
transformation of neo-letrado Luis from different perspectives. The
novel reaches its climax when the readers gradually put together all the
clues from Raquel’s letter and discover Luis’s disappearance. Raquel
retells the most important moments of her relationship with Luis and
realizes the need to change her lifestyle: “I close my eyes in the hope
of becoming a different person, after a period of forgetting that does
not rob my time, without knowing what will happen to me. Here I
go” (591). Raquel realizes that drug trafficking has transformed her
subjectivity and her emotional relationships. Luis, for his part, identi-
fies with a world of costly merchandise and money that he did not
know before and he forgets the passion for literature he once had. In
an extensive letter to her friend Juana, Raquel comments on Luis’s
new profession: “He didn’t come back to teach again. From then on
his only work obligations would be the commerce of cocaine . . . A
change of profession is like a change of nature. You change skin—or
clothes, which is the same thing—and, more than that, you change
inside, you become another, as if you were changing your astrological
sign, your personality” (485). In the same chapter, Esteban writes to
Luis complaining about the latter’s change of profession and his new
interest for money: “You dedicate yourself to ‘business.’ A humiliat-
ing lack of precision in a poetry expert. It is as if you lost a passion
for books, as if the book’s sheets of paper were replaced with another
type of paper, one that you now spend in your free time, paper money.
How long has it been since you read a book?” (506). Luis also writes
to Esteban describing the impossibility of going back to his previ-
ous profession: “I have now spent several hours trying to write an
account of the events in a letter that means much more to me than to
you” (504). With this letter, Luis closes the door on his old life and
158 Alberto Fonseca
becomes a new person who actively participates in his new profession.

Luis is no longer the ambitious literature professor who was in love
with Raquel, but rather has become a member of the mafia, addicted
to drug money.
An underlying theme Cartas cruzadas develops is the tensions that
drug trafficking generates on the neo-letrados’ selves and their social
role. The narrative is a critique of Colombian society in general—
but, especially, of Colombian intellectuals—and its relationship with
illegal activities. Neo-letrados position themselves differently in the
cultural field and each one—whether they are literature professors,
artists, or writers—continue the traditional ambivalent relationship
Latin American intellectuals have held with their society. As Angel
Rama argues in The Lettered City (1984), Latin American history
has always been characterized by the close relationship between the
urban centers, in which power and capital congregate, and the creole
intelligentsia.4 For Rama, the lettered elite have exercised an organi-
zational role in the formation of Latin American national discourses
and have established an ambivalent relationship with power. In The
Lettered City, Rama underlines the autonomous power that writing
had in the nineteenth century resulting from the letrados’ ability
to establish order and express it on a cultural level. As examples of
this consolidating power, Rama uses Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s
case and his role as a letrado: Sarmiento considered cities as civiliz-
ing centers in opposition to the country, which was seen as barbaric.
The lettered city gave its members the attributes of a sacred order,
a brotherhood of religious leaders, administrators, educators and
writers who dedicated themselves to extensive literary works thus
having control over the “order of signs,” that is, the use of writing
for shaping society. According to Rama, the interest of the members
of the lettered city was double: on one hand they were cultured writ-
ers and on the other they wanted to become an autonomous power
within the institutions of power. In other words, by being “owners
of the written word” they served power and at the same time pos-
sessed power. Rama also studies the continuing role that letrados
had in relation to the traditional centers of power in spite of society’s
constant changes in order to keep up with the modern times. In his
discussion of the function of writing in nineteenth-century Latin
American society, the Uruguayan critic explains that:
Letters seemed to offer a ladder for the upwardly mobile, conferring

respectability and access to the centers of power, as well as a greater
relative autonomy regarding those centers of power, thanks to the new
diversity of sources of wealth and the broadening economic base of

the period’s developing bourgeois societies. The literate could now sell
scripts to theatrical companies or articles to newspapers, be employed
as reporters, work as teachers, compose lyrics for popular music, or
write or translate for the penny press. (Lettered 53)
The creation of national Language Academies and their normative

effect on the region’s language reinforced the importance of the
letrado’s function within the modernizing process. Rama points out
that the foundation of the first Academy in Colombia (1872) was a
“response of the lettered city to the linguistic subversion occurring
as a result of general democratizing trends” (59). For Rama, this was
a unique case because of the important social status of Colombian
letrados. For example, the founder of the Language Academy, Miguel
Antonio Caro, would also become president of the republic. When
Rama studies the evolution of the letrado in the twentieth century, he
focuses primarily on the modern period that goes from from 1870 to
1920 with a few scattered comments about the rest of the century up
to the Cuban Revolution, but he does not explore the social changes
that took place in the final decades of the twentieth century. In The
Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (2002), Jean Franco takes up
the figure of the letrado from Rama and adds a new configuration in
the context of the cold war and its influence in the Latin American
region. For Franco, during the 1960s the letrados redefined their tra-
ditional role through speeches and newspaper articles that positioned
them as moderators and evaluators of contemporary reality.
At the end of the twentieth century, globalization, transnational
interests, and the displacement of cultural products have changed
Latin American society in such a way that the traditional figure of the
letrado has been forced to position himself at the margins of a neolib-
eral postmodern world, that is, to become a neo-letrado. Neoliberalism
and the social and cultural crisis drug trafficking has brought about
turn intellectuals and their privileged social status into the group of
neo-letrados, who now find themselves in a marginal social position,
inhabiting a world without ideals that has succumbed to the logic of
easy money and where writing no longer possesses any power. The
neo-letrados not only experience the achievements of a neoliberal,
globalized world but also, sometimes—like Luis’s case, in Cartas
cruzadas—take a position that questions the mechanisms and ideol-
ogy that traditionally supported the lettered city. While the traditional
view of the Latin American letrado was tied from the very begin-
ning to writing, the concept of neo-letrado allows one to read Luis’s
160 Alberto Fonseca
and Esteban’s view of social changes in relation to their existence in a

society in which audio-visual media, publicity, and consumption have
taken the role writing used to fulfill and become the principal discur-
sive forms. Instead of the intellectual who is consumed by his passion
for high culture and social justice, the neo-letrados in Jaramillo’s novel
inhabit a new era in which they have time for a morning jog and pro-
tein shakes as part of the ostentatious lifestyle, facilitated because of
their connection with the world of illegal drugs.
Drug trafficking gave birth to promises of social ascent and prog-
ress that infected all social levels. Old money lost its social role faced
with mafia money as the fortunes of traditional wealth were over-
shadowed by the flow of money from illegal businesses. This dynamic
allowed Pablo Escobar to buy the objects and spaces that were tradi-
tionally reserved for old money. Escobar and other drug lords offered
the Colombian elites the possibility of maintaining their position by
participating in illegal activities like money laundering. At the same
time, drug trafficking activity created mechanisms of social ascen-
dancy based on the possibility for common individuals to smuggle
shipment as a mule or to work for one of the “heavies” of the drug
cartels. Just like the Corleone family in the film The Godfather, the
Colombian mafia had an entourage of educated people like journal-
ists, lawyers, politicians, and religious leaders who defended their
interests. Jaramillo’s novel emphasizes the social repercussions of a
society that chooses to remain silent and not express any opposition
when faced with the power of the mafia.
The way in which the novel articulates the relationship between
the neo-letrado characters and drug trafficking is an important part
of the text’s construction. On the one hand, the narrative pushes
readers to establish a relationship with the failure of neo-letrados to
denounce the social mirage that the illegal drug trade has created.
On the other hand, with this type of texts, Colombian writers and
intellectuals have taken it upon themselves to represent the social
transformations of a country living under these conditions. In their
ideology, these texts manifest the struggle to not succumb to the
power of violence and money offered by the drug trade. For example,
Luis has forgotten his old profession but at the same time he has
partly recovered his role as a cultural critic when he recognizes the
negative influence of the drug world. Cultural producers in Colombia
felt the need to design new literary forms, new artistic structures, in
order to present a faithful representation of a new social reality, which
included the sicarios or hire assassins phenomenon, paramilitarism,
neoliberalism, and an omnipresent violence. In Cartas cruzadas the
savage capitalism of the 1970s and 1980s results in a rationalization

of drug trafficking and an explanation of the discourses that preceded
the logic of consumption and ostentation:
Maniquean judgments about the illegal empire are not lacking.

Obviously, we are dealing with a harmful drug here. But the condi-
tions for this to happen had already been created. Violating the law
had become a habit. Well before now, people had lost respect for the
law. The corrupt official, the contractor who pays commissions, the tax
evader, businesses where the owner goes one way and the employees
another, political organizations created only to obtain a job with the
government. With impunity, and long before new wealth had millions
and millions in their hands and wanted to buy everything, everyone
here was robbing and taking advantage of others. (299)
The novel succeeds in placing the phenomenon of drug trafficking

into the context of a series of illegal cultural practices—black-mar-
ket activity, tax evasion, or other ways of breaking the law—that
Colombian society had internalized before the emergence of neo-
liberalism and the social marginalization of the popular classes.
However, the text’s defense of Luis’s function in the drug trafficking
business responds to a new social ethic whose main characteristics
are related to consumption and money. In fact, the novel’s characters
often consider drug trafficking as a reaction to the crisis of values in
their society. The mafia’s control of the drug market becomes the
(il)logical consequence of the transformation of social structures in
Colombia. For example, Luis reflects on the extinction of the epis-
tolary genre in an increasingly more rapid and technological society:
“People don’t sit for hours in front of paper and invent words for
their friends, meditate, withdraw into one’s room to write secrets to
one’s friends: now you lift a handset, you greet someone through a
black artifact and send a kiss through a metal cable and you shout
‘hello, hello,’ while someone—as Salinger once described it—says an
inaudible ‘I love you’ on the other side of the line” (97). From his
neo-letrado position, Luis contrasts the intimacy and confidentiality
of the letter to the speed and obscurity of a telephone call. In the
same way, his friend Esteban works on the creation of a “river-poem,”
a “magma-text” that has a musical structure and which celebrates the
passion of writing, the discourse that marks the difference between
a neo-letrado and the illiterate masses. Writing letters was an activ-
ity that belonged to a world that no longer exists; a world that will
also surface in the letters’ contents. As the epistolary conversation
advances, the novel exposes the changes in Colombian society, the
162 Alberto Fonseca
increasingly common stories of girlfriends and close friends who have

been arrested with cocaine, and those who have become rich over-
night. From their positions as neo-letrados, Esteban and Luis write
about the wealth that cocaine has brought to the country, about a
new social class ready to take all the risks but also about this class’
influence in all types of cultural practices and habits. Esteban’s trip
to New York to visit friends and the inheritance that he receives from
his father is what makes Luis question the slow success of his aca-
demic work and consider the possibility that illegally earned money
from the drug trade would allow him to have a new life. Society’s
jealous spirit works on Luis despite being aware of the changes this
new lifestyle has produced in Raquel. Luis begins to change: the first
signs of a new lifestyle begin to appear; a Mercedes automobile in
front of the house, and fear of denunciation and mafia violence will
replace literature as his main concerns.
Raquel’s story adds an additional aspect to the novel’s portrayal
of contemporary society: it represents the changes that have affected
the Colombian family structure. Raquel’s sister runs a business that
launders drug money while the rest of her family chooses not to
understand what lies behind the early success of the business. The
family values that grounded Raquel’s childhood—work, study,
perseverance—are shaken and the personal relationships of an entire
generation disrupted. Raquel reflects on wealth—whether inherited
or earned—about the uniqueness and irreplaceability of time and
about life situations that can only be found in a society controlled
by drug trafficking: her first boyfriend is incarcerated in the United
States and her last one has disappeared. For his part, Esteban reflects
on a culture where money reigns, and on a society that has already
scabbed over, anesthetized to the “human” cost; its members have
begun to accept being part of the illegal drug trade as a viable career
option. In his correspondence with Luis, he recognizes that the old
values have gradually disappeared and that he is witnessing greedy
inhabitants destroying their city. He notices that the old wealth in
the city of Antioquia is in decline and the members of this social
group can only recover their lost honor “taking a kilo of coke to
Miami” (84). Esteban also sees in the new wealth’s behavior a dia-
logue with the past and the social discrimination that existed in
Medellin. Society had deliberately ignored new wealth forcing them
to become extravagant to be noticed and at the same time pushing
new wealth to look for new ways to break the dividing line between
social classes. Esteban points out symbols of this extravagance: “the
horses and the summer farm, not to mention an extremely expensive
car and abundant gold on the wrists and neck” (286). Luis, the other
member of the neo-letrado trio, decides to work with his brother-
in-law because he feels trapped without money, but also because in
Colombia it is almost impossible to find someone who works hon-
estly and does not give into temptation: “Take a look at my neighbor,
my cousin, or the guy next door, there is always an example close
at hand, now he has a house, car, farm, and income” (288). Drug
trafficking not only accelerates Colombian high society’s process of
decay, but also transforms culture in all social classes. Furthermore,
it exposes the dissolution of values in the country and confirms that
a society whose economy depends on luck—winning the lottery,
finding a mine, buying low and selling high, smuggling kilos—will
fragment quickly.
Cartas cruzadas thus illustrates Colombian society’s love–hate
relationship with narcotrafficking. Before deciding to work with his
brother-in-law, Luis tells Esteban about the possibility of traffick-
ing for a short period of time without dirtying his hands. However,
Esteban recognizes the risks that Luis ignores:
I have spent years hearing you praise the advantages of your profes-
sion. You are always learning. Vacations are long. The university is
the uterus that nourishes you. They pay you to read what you like.
Suddenly, you change all this to look for an uncertain point of equilib-
rium based on your wealth . . . The idea that one gets so many millions
and then retires is a lie. No way, it isn’t possible. First, because once
you are infected with the virus of greed, you will never have enough to
satisfy yourself. You will become obsessed with money. (332)
Esteban’s comments force Luis to recognize that when one is part of

a society where anyone can become a multimillionaire at the age of
twenty and many of its members are dedicated to achieving that kind
of success, then that society is controlled by chaos (337). The medita-
tions of these neo-letrados highlight a sense of responsibility, of col-
lective guilt in which, despite not belonging to a band of assassins nor
having contact with them, the neo-letrados feel they are condoning
criminal actions. Esteban and Raquel see themselves represented in
the underhanded acceptance of Luis’s gifts, in the gradual acceptance
of a new lifestyle. Similarly, families in the story are portrayed as indi-
rectly but complicitly participating in the drug trafficking process.
Raquel comes from a traditional Antioquean family whose members
are embarrassed that Luis is involved with an illicit business, but at the
same time they benefit from the corrupt commissions of their perfect
son-in-law, Max. Esteban has a similar feeling when he recognizes
164 Alberto Fonseca
that even though he does not sell or traffic cocaine, he still benefits
from the new economic circumstances:
Now I am no longer a victim. Now I am an accomplice. I discover my

resolve here, my ridiculous resolve of trying to make Doña Gabriela
know that I don’t work at the same thing that Luis does. At the same
time that I act as a seller, I tell her that I am not mixed up in “inconve-
nient” affairs. Hypocrite. I am a hypocrite. I am no longer a victim. It
could be that I don’t make, transport or sell cocaine. But I end up ben-
efiting from the money that is produced when some brother of mine,
whether I know it or not, sells this white elephant to Luis. (522)
In Esteban’s lament, now I am an accomplice, the penetration that

drug trafficking has achieved in all social levels is very clear for all to
see. Incapable of explaining to himself the reasons that would drive
his friend Luis to work for the drug traffickers, Esteban recognizes
his own participation in the cocaine bonanza. His business is able
to build and sell expensive apartments because of the extravagant
expenses drug money has made possible. Members of Colombian
society have gone from victims of a social class that loves getting rich
quickly to become its accomplice: despite the deaths and statistics,
everyone, including workers, managers, and salesmen, benefit from
drug money.5
The new structure of feeling that emerges in a society that values
instantaneous success affects emotional and sentimental relationships
between the characters. Their new subjectivities finds in their episto-
lary conversation signs of a gradual justification and interpretation of
the business of drug trafficking. Raquel, Esteban, and Luis, through
their letters, produce an important analysis about the gains and effects
of the narcotraffic industry in their generation.
Borrowing Angel Rama’s theoretical approach from The Lettered
City allows us to establish the importance of the letrado discourse
in the formation of national Latin American societies and the new
configuration of this concept as an upshot of a neoliberal society that
has fallen victim to narcotrafficking. The novel depicts the changes in
the position of neo-letrados as a phenomenon intimately interwoven
with neoliberalism, narco culture, and the global criminal economy.
Esteban and Luis experience the fading of their role as critics and
guarantors of a semiotic and social order and find themselves in a
marginal context within the mafia society. Luis’s transformation—
exchanging his position as university professor for the narcotraffic
world—constitutes a sign of his new position as neo-letrado and
the loss of the intellectual’s traditional role. Thus both Luis’s and
Esteban’s status of letrado mutate and they no longer form part of

the lettered city, choosing to belong to the illegal city. Furthermore,
the author of the text, Darío Jaramillo Agudelo, is neo-letrado him-
self, an intellectual who has experienced a shifting of social position
similar to the one described in his novel. He has personally seen the
changes and transformations of Colombian society due to drug traf-
ficking and has also lived the mutations of his role as intellectual. His
narco-narrative evaluates the tensions that are generated within the
literary field in Colombia and the emergence of new structures of
feeling that modify the role of letrados in society. Luis and Esteban
are neo-letrados who can realize different “readings” of their city,
Medellin, Colombia. Even though they become disillusioned at each
step, their voices are the most appropriate to describe a totalizing
view of a society that has not been able to overcome its problems and
contradictions.
Latin American societies had in writing and in the letrado class a
way of identifying the problems they were facing. Historically, writ-
ing has been the element ordering the chaos of barbarism and the
letrados are those called upon to exercise this priesthood. In my read-
ing of Cartas cruzadas, neo-letrados criticize the violence that the
real city inflicts upon the lettered city, but also point out the possible
negotiations and incorporations that characterize narco-culture. In
Rama’s book the letrados invest their symbolic capital in achieving
discursive practices that mark the differences between the letrado
elite and society. The letrado is seen as the builder of identity and dis-
course about the nation. In Cartas cruzadas the neo-letrados are wit-
nesses to the changes narcotraffic has brought to the physical city and
their discourse at the same time that the world of illegal drug trade
contaminate their language and writing. The letrados position them-
selves in a changing world in which power and writing are becoming
more complex while narcotraffic transforms different sectors of the
social structure.
Notes
1. In his article “The Prehistory of Narcotraffic in Colombia: American
Fears and Colombian Realities During the First Half of the Century,”
Eduardo Sáenz Rovner describes the genesis of the drug mafia in
Colombia. In the 1930s, the marijuana business began in Colombia
as a result of the 1937 American sanctions. In the 1950s, Cuba
and the so-called Havana connection became the principal door-
way to send drugs from Colombia. However, it was in the 1960s
when the business moved to Miami and Colombians began to supply
100 percent of the cocaine that Cubans distributed in the United
166 Alberto Fonseca
States (204). For Sáenz Rovner, the 1970s saw the mafia begin to
organize into clans and cartels with great power and political influ-
ence in the Colombian society (205).
2. For a study of the letrado figure in Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de
los sicarios (The Virgin of the Assassins, 1994), see the first chapter
of my dissertation “Cuando llovió dinero en Macondo: Literatura y
narcotráfico en Colombia y México.”
3. The narrative possibility of reconstructing subjectivity through let-
ters is also the principal theme of Jaramillo’s novel La voz interior
(The Voice Within, 2006) in which the main character reconstructs
the life of a friend through intimate diaries.
4. In the present study I use Angel Rama’s theory in The Lettered
City about the importance of the figure of the letrado throughout
Latin American history to demonstrate that a new relationship exists
between written culture and centers of power. According to Rama,
Latin American cities developed through a progression: “the ordered
city,” “the city of letters,” “the city of protocols,” “the modernized
city,” “the polis politicized,” and “the city revolutionized.” Each
stage is associated with a particular relationship between the city,
writing, and center of power. In his book, Rama does not study the
new configuration that letrados find in a Latin American society that
has fallen victim to the influence of narcotraffic. New studies about
the function of the letrado add new approaches to the role that this
elite group holds with the society of its time, especially in a society
in crisis. In his contribution to a book on Rama that Mabel Moraña
edited, Angel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos, Santiago Castro
Gómez explains how writing “made possible the emergence of cogni-
tive reflections about Latin American societies, but also the forma-
tion of reflexive subjectivities, which interacted with institutionalized
knowledge” (128).
5. In general, Colombian narco-narratives reflect on the guilt of a soci-
ety that gave way to narcotraffic. José Libardo Porra’s Hijos de la
nieve [Sons of the Snow] (2000), for example, shows how in Medellin
everyone is guilty and no individual exists who has not yield to the
temptation of easy money. Incarcerated, the main character reflects
on his responsibility related to narcotraffic. For Capeto, the guilt of
the success of drug trafficking has affected Colombian society as a
group: “[t]he guilt is all mine. Guilt? Who would be guilty? Who
would be innocent? In Medellin let the innocent throw the first
Stone. We all win, we all eat” (104).
Bibliography
Abad Faciolince, Héctor. “Estética y narcotráfico.” Número 7 (1995): 2–3.
Barbero, Jesús M. Cultura, medios y sociedad. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional
de Colombia, 1998.
Barbero, Jesús M. “La ciudad que median los miedos.” Espacio urbano:
Comunicación y Violencia en América Latina. Ed. Mabel Moraña.
Pittsburgh: ILLI, 2002. 19–35.
Castro Gómez, Santiago. “Los vecindarios de la ciudad letrada.” Angel
Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos. Ed. Mabel Moraña. Pittsburgh:
ILLI, 1997. 123–133.
Fonseca, Alberto. “Cuando llovió dinero en Macondo: Literatura y narcotrá-
fico en Colombia y México.” Diss. University of Kansas, 2009.
Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002.
The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures, 1972.
Jaramillo Agudelo, Darío. Cartas cruzadas. Bogotá: Alfaguara, 1995.
Jaramillo, María Mercedes, Betty Osorio de Negret, and Ángela Inés
Robledo, eds. Literatura y cultura: narrativa colombiana del Siglo XX.
Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2000.
Porras, José Libardo. Hijos de la nieve. Bogotá: Planeta, 2000.
Rama, Ángel. The Lettered City. Trans. John Charles Chasteen. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996.
Reguillo, Rossana. “Guerreros o ciudadanos: violencia. Una cartografía de
las interacciones urbanas.” Espacio urbano: Comunicación y Violencia en
América Latina. Ed. Mabel Moraña. Pittsburgh: ILLI, 2002. 38–51.
Romero, Diana. Rev of Cartas cruzadas de Darío Jaramillo. Hispamérica 86
(2000): 142–144.
Rotker, Susana and Catherine Goldman, eds. Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence
in Latin America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Sáenz Rovner, Eduardio. “La prehistoria del narcotráfico en Colombia:
temores norteamericanos y realidades colombianas durante la primera
mitad del siglo.” Crisis sociopolitical colombiana: un análisis no coyuntural
de la coyuntura. Ed. Luz Gabriela Arango. Bogotá: Fundación social,
1997. 190–212.
Salazar J, Alonso. La cola del lagarto: drogas y narcotráfico en la sociedad
colombiana. Medellín: Corporación Región, 1998.
Shaw, Donald. “Darío Jaramillo’s Cartas cruzadas (1995) as a Post-boom
Novel.” New Novel Review 5.1 (1998): 19–35.
Vallejo, Fernando. La Virgen de los sicarios. Bogotá: Alfaguara, 1994.
Villoria Nolla, Maite. “(Sub)culturas y narrativas: Representación del sicari-
ato en La Virgen de los sicarios.” Cuadernos de Literatura 8 (2002):
106–114.
Chapter 8
The Reader as Translator: Rewriting

the Past in Contemporary
Latin American Fiction
Janet Hendrickson
O ne of the largest problems facing contemporary Latin American

writers is the Boom, or rather, readers’ demand for a particular ver-
sion of it. The international and US markets, in particular, often have
seemed to expect a “Boom jr.,” as Rodrigo Fresán once called it (55).1
To make matters worse, the perceived “Boom jr.” often takes the
form of a cheapened magical realism that reduces and essentializes
the whole, diverse Latin American region into a uniform, colorful
rural and political entity, “where everyone wears a sombrero and lives
in the trees,” as Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez wryly noted in
the introduction to their anthology, McOndo (14). The writers associ-
ated with McOndo have been careful to note that their work does not
reject the Boom and their literary past, though they also suggest that
critics have argued as much. Ignacio Padilla states: “[Some] believe
we decided to free ourselves from the heavy shadow of our illustrious
forefathers of the Boom, but we’re not that foolish” (137). Instead,
he and his fellow writers have been careful to clarify that they reject a
market demand for the Boom and its inferior disciples, what Pascale
Casanova called a “vogue for exoticism” in The World Republic of
Letters, her groundbreaking examination of international literary cul-
ture (121).2 Positions such as those established in some post-Boom
anthologies have been vital to the Spanish-language conversation
about recent Latin American literature.3 However, it is sometimes
unclear what impact such anthologies have had on the international
and English-speaking literary market that had provoked the need to
take a stance.
170 Jane t Hendrickson
More recent anthologies, originally published in English or trans-

lated into English, have specifically asked readers to free contempo-
rary writers from their expectations of the Boom. In the foreword to
Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists issue, published
in 2010, editors Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles, in their analysis
of writers born since 1975, assert more separation than Padilla does
when he clarifies that McOndo writers did not reject their predeces-
sors’ work. They write: “This generation—and those before it—has
been able to forge new paths, unfettered by the shadows of yester-
day’s literary masters” (7). In 2009, the Peruvian novelist Diego
Trelles Paz edited El futuro no es nuestro (The Future Is Not Ours),
an anthology of writers born since 1970, which I translated and one
of whose stories is the focus of this chapter.4 Like Padilla, in his
prologue to the anthology, Trelles does not hold to the idea that
writers of his generation seek to reject their predecessors’ influence.5
However, like other anthologists, he seeks to address a readership
whose expectations have been formed by those writers. He asks the
anthology’s readers not to judge its stories solely in comparison to
their literary predecessors’ work: “We want to be read, of course, but
without allowing the market to place the burden on our shoulders of
the wonderful and undoubtedly formative literary past that belongs
to the Boom writers, the beloved monsters of our literary apprentice-
ship” (xxv). While the Boom writers may influence the contemporary
generation of writers, readers should not expect to find a reiteration
of the past in contemporary work. Indeed, many reasons aside from
an individual writer’s talent or temperament prevent a particular type
of a regional Boom novel from repeating itself, if such a “type” really
even existed.
In this chapter, I will examine the problematic nature of con-
temporary writers’—that is, post-McOndo writers’—relationship to
readers and the literary past in several ways. First, I will discuss how
a postmodern literary culture may prevent writers from creating a
totalizing national or regional novel or a derivative Boom-type fic-
tion. As Casanova’s study shows, while a desire for legitimacy in the
international literary culture may encourage writers to identify their
home broadly in terms of language or literature, such identifications
do not—and, in fact, need not—necessarily separate writers, and, like-
wise, their editors and critics, from their origins or concerns about
readers and the canon. Second, I will closely read an exemplary story
in The Future Is Not Ours that shows how the right kind of reader-
ship may bridge a writer’s literary and linguistic past and present in
an international literary space. Finally, I will extrapolate from this
Th e R e a d e r a s T r a n s l at o r 171
story to propose a translational model of readership for contemporary

Latin American work.
As many postmodern critics have noted, national and regional
identities seem to have fragmented in recent years, as has the possibil-
ity of the grand novels that accompany them. In perhaps his simplest
formulation of the postmodern condition, Lyotard writes, “I define
postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv), be they sci-
entific, political, aesthetic, or philosophic grand narratives that claim
to “reveal the meaning of all stories” (Readings 63). In the prologue
to The Future Is Not Ours, Trelles suggests a version of that disbelief
in metanarratives as they might play out in the Latin American novel.
He writes that the younger generation of Latin American writers,
those born since 1970, are united primarily in their rejection of the
so-called “totalizing novel, or in other words . . . this idea, so rooted
in the Latin American writers of the Boom, of the novel as a genre
committed to explaining an era in its totality and faithfully spanning
our countries’ tragicomic history” (xxiii–xxiv). His observation, that
contemporary Latin American fiction has moved away from the total-
izing novel, corresponds with a similar loss of a totalizing vision for
the society. Migration, fragmentation, and global awareness contrib-
ute to many of the younger generation’s perspectives. Trelles observes
that the writers of the generation born since 1970 have witnessed and
felt the impact of violence and rupture (as well as larger cultural cur-
rents) on a global scale. These are writers
who as teenagers and young adults witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the Srebrenica massacre, the fall of
perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold
War, and armed subversion and military repression in South America;
who witnessed the rise of the internet, Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the pro-
longed, methodical murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, the height of
electronic music, the attacks on the World Trade Center, terrorist attacks
in Spain and the U.K., the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Guantánamo
prison, the Darfur genocide, the election of the first black president of
the United States, the revolutions and popular uprisings of the Arab
Spring, the occupation of many cities’ parks and streets by citizens
angry at the current state of affairs, and, among many armed conflicts,
the Soviet and U.S. invasions of Afghanistan, as well as the U.S. inva-
sion of Iraq with an international coalition of countries. (xii–xiii)
Writers who have witnessed and been informed by an international

array of upheavals may correspondingly be inclined to locate their
work in an international, rather than in a national or a regional
context. While biography, of course, does not alone account for any
writer’s production, this idea of an internationalized consciousness
corresponds with a larger movement toward globalization that Julio
Ortega notes: “[T]he future is no longer that of the nation; globaliza-
tion is relentless in its power and scope” (634). At the same time, the
simultaneously ruptured and globalized location need not be a site
for what Lyotard calls “nostalgia for the lost narrative” (41). Instead,
it may prove to be a creatively fertile space.
Trelles, like a great many writers, identifies the writer’s home as
literature, a home unrestricted by the geographic boundaries that
define any national tradition. He observes in the prologue that an
internationally conscious Latin American writer’s origin “is no longer
vital for us. Neither our roots nor our traditions, much less concepts
as outdated as nationality or country, now limit our unconditional
pact with fiction” (xxiv). Such an observation suggests that an identi-
fication beyond one’s national origins and the past can be grounds for
a fuller commitment to literature. The editors of Granta take a posi-
tion similar to Trelles’s. They state that when the idea of a national
literature has diminished in importance, “[t]he literary homeland . . . is
the language itself” (8). The Boom writers, granted a place in literary
history, may have come from a literary homeland defined by Spanish
and Portuguese. Yet that literary homeland of language is not an idea
of nation or region that an uninformed reader might derive from their
texts, nor is it exclusively a national literary tradition.
However, the division between the homelands of nation, language,
and literature is not necessarily clear. This is particularly true when a
writer seeks literary legitimacy on an international scale—or, perhaps,
when an editor or anthologist seeks such recognition more delib-
erately for writers through a particular publication.6 In The World
Republic of Letters, Casanova argues that most writers have sought
entrance to the international body of literature, except those work-
ing within a closed national literature by choice or by circumstance.
She observes that historically, writers needed to pass through Paris—
physically, through exile, or symbolically, through critical attention
and translation, or both—for their work to be legitimated as liter-
ature, at least on an international level. Among her examples, she
includes Faulkner, virtually unknown until translated into French,
and the Boom writers themselves.7 More recently other cities have
contended with Paris’s centrality as the world capital of literature—
most notably the English-language capitals of London and New York,
but also Rome, Frankfurt, and Barcelona, the last in particular for
Spanish-language writers (164).
While writers must achieve literary legitimacy through a world

literary capital, they can only enter what Casanova calls the world
“literary competition” (40) through their national or linguistic ori-
gins: “[T]he writer stands in a particular relationship to world liter-
ary space by virtue of the place occupied in it by the national space
into which he has been born” (41). She argues that this particularity
applies to all writers, whether they are conscious of it or not. This
would include, of course, the Post-Boom Latin American writers. She
argues that many Latin American writers during the first part of the
twentieth century found their national literary cultures limiting, and
so they did what she claims many writers do from historically smaller
literary traditions: build their “literary resources” by reading litera-
ture from other traditions, either in the original language, or often in
translation (134). While foreign literature and translation may enrich
a young or isolated literary tradition, translation, particularly into a
powerful world literary language like French or English, grants writ-
ers from historically smaller literatures access to legitimacy on the
world scene. Casanova considers translation “an act of consecration”
(135) for writers from “a minor source language,” which Spanish
arguably once was. According to Casanova, translation “amounts, in
fact, to acceding to the status of literature, to obtaining a certificate
of literary standing” (135). Her argument would suggest that new
generations of Latin American writers can participate in an interna-
tionally recognized tradition now that the translated writers of the
Boom, as well as many of their predecessors, have thus been conse-
crated by translation.
At the same time, for a writer to matter in the international literary
sphere, his or her work must do something new. Indeed, the excite-
ment of any anthology of young writers, in any language and for any
audience, comes in part from its promise to innovate and renew a
literary tradition in some way, be it a national or regional tradition or,
more broadly, a world literary tradition. It is not an illustrious past
that makes a young writer’s work ultimately valuable, but rather, what
that writer does with a present that, of course, encompasses a literary
legacy. Casanova argues that writers seeking literary legitimacy must
engage with contemporary world literature, if only to surpass its most
recent innovations: “[T]he only way in literary space to be truly mod-
ern is to contest the present as outmoded—to appeal to a still more
present present, as yet unknown, which thus becomes the newest cer-
tified present” (91).8 This is what such richly imaginative writers as
Carpentier, García Márquez, and Borges, himself a great translator,
did. Many, though hardly all, of the major twentieth-century Latin
American writers paired an international literary consciousness with

what Carpentier called “the Latin American sensibility” (quoted in
Casanova 223), drawing from and creating a non-European tradition
that flourished in what was later to be called magical realism.
But this past innovation has become the very outmoded thing that
contemporary writers find they must surpass in some sense. It has
become the shadow of the Boom made oppressive by the weight of
a global literary market. Casanova differentiates between “genuine
literary internationalism” (172) and the world literature produced for
a commercially globalized publishing business that flattens real and
innovative literary difference:
Under the label “world fiction,” products based on tested aesthetic for-
mulas and designed to appeal to the widest possible readership . . . are
marketed alongside updated versions of mythological fables and ancient
classics that place a recycled “wisdom” and morality within the reach
of everyone and books that combine travel writing with aspects of the
adventure novel. (171)
Such aesthetic formulas might be what readers seek in the Post-Boom

Latin American international bestsellers.9 Even as sophisticated a
reader as Casanova could state as late as 1999 that magical realism
“was to become in effect the generative formula of all Latin American
literature from the 1960s on” (222). This is not true, of course: many
contemporary Latin American writers claim a more diverse literary
heritage than that which might be categorized as magical realism,
citing influences not only from the world canon but also, as Trelles
notes, from other Latin American sources, including literary writers
such as Manuel Puig and Diamela Eltit, what he calls the “literature
without a capital L” (xxiv) of genre fiction. Of course, Latin America
is not a single and homogeneous literary space, but one defined by
many national traditions and further particularities within them.
However, for many readers, the line between genuine literary interna-
tionalism and commercial literary globalism is blurred, and it is often
with these readers that contemporary writers must contend, at least
when they publish.
It is at times through a concern about readers that the prologue
to Trelles’s anthology suggests concerns similar to Casanova’s idea of
international literary legitimacy. Even as the title, The Future Is Not
Ours, plays against the idea of concern about posterity, the prologue
acknowledges that posterity concerns the anthologist, whether or not
it might concern the writers within. When Trelles explains his motives
for putting together the book, originally directed toward a Spanish-

speaking audience, he cites a question that Tomás Eloy Martínez
attributed to Angel Rama, “Who will remain in history?” (ix). While
a “Boom jr.” may not—and perhaps should not—ever arrive, readers,
including international readers who comprise the problematic inter-
pretive community that still demands the Boom, have a large role in
determining writers’ literary legitimacy and their historical legacy, and
the anthologist recognizes readers’ influence and writers’ relation-
ships with them. Trelles states one of his hopes through the book “is
to recover the active exchange with the reader who gives literature its
only pertinent fire” (xxiv). He refers, at least in the anthology’s initial
Latin American context, to a desire for a Latin American readership
that transcends the internal editorial isolation that exists between the
region’s countries. But his statement might resonate equally well in
reference to the worldwide readers whose critical power gives litera-
ture access to worldwide recognition.
A concern about readers may appear to lead to a dilemma. The
Post-Boom writers—or perhaps more specifically, editors and anthol-
ogists—may claim that writers have gone beyond both geographic
and canonical boundaries demarcated by a literary past. However, as
they also acknowledge, writers never exist entirely apart from their
origins, and additionally, through publication, writers still often con-
tend with readers who expect an iteration of the literary past. Editors,
anthologists, and critics may try to educate readers to apply a new set
of interpretive paradigms to new writers’ work. However, the pos-
sibility of such an education may not solve a writer’s more immedi-
ate problem of how to deal with the literary past and readers during
the act of writing. The “literary homeland” of language or fiction is
still populated with other writers with whom most of its inhabitants
interact. The place of readers during the act of writing, however, is
more questionable. In fact, a literary tradition promotes the idea that
art should be unconcerned with its audience. As Walter Benjamin
states in his well-known essay, “The Task of the Translator,” which I
will revisit later in this chapter, “No poem is intended for the reader,
no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener” (253).
Regardless, if a work is to have readers, what characteristics would
a good reader have? In what would a positive, productive “active
exchange” between the reader and the writer consist?
In what follows, I propose to examine the relationship between the
reader, the writer, and the literary past in the final story of The Future
Is Not Ours. The Venezuelan novelist Slavko Zupcic’s “Love Belongs
to Another Port” is narrated by a young Venezuelan writer, Zlatica
Didič, in search of his Croatian father who is also named Zlatica

Didič. The narrator’s father abandoned his mother at his birth. The
author, Zupcic, was a finalist for the nineteenth Herralde Novel Prize
and was selected by the Hay Festival in 2007 as one of the thirty-nine
most important Latin American writers under thirty-nine years old.
This short story was the basis for his novel Círculo Croata (Croatian
Circle, 2006), and it is particularly relevant to the questions of this
chapter, because its protagonist tries to write his way through his lit-
erary and personal past in the context of an internationalized body of
writing. In this story, the narrator is haunted by a stack of letters that
his father left behind, written in Croatian. The narrator does not read
Croatian, but he believes that he needs to be able to read the letters
to write his and his father’s story. Halfway through the narration, his
long-lost father reads an early draft of the narrator’s story in a news-
paper’s literary contest. As a result, the narrator meets his father for a
single afternoon, and his father translates the letters.10
In Zupcic’s story, a good reader does the opposite of not imposing
the literary past on a writer. The good reader, the narrator’s father,
instead is able to bridge the past and the present. As a result, the
past ceases to be a literary burden, like the physical copies of the let-
ters that the narrator begins carrying with him everywhere he goes.
Instead, when properly read, the past is something that can form
part of narrations in the present. A good reader enables a writer to
look toward the future by helping him or her communicate with and
through the past. This communication can save both the writer and
the reader from Lyotard’s “nostalgia for the lost narrative,” which
remains an inaccessible narrative until an effective “communicational
interaction” takes place (41).11 A good reader is a translator: someone
who makes the past available to the language of the present.
The narrator, Zlatica Didič, begins by establishing the difficulty of
writing this story about his origins, which cannot be defined by one
national space. The narrator’s name itself divides him, rather unusu-
ally, between two national cultures. He shares his first and last name,
Zlatica and Didič, with his Croatian immigrant father. His middle
name, Corazón de Jesús, locates him in Valencia, Venezuela, as the
name is shared with the church next to his house. Despite his inter-
national position, the narrator’s tenuous grasp of his origins makes
writing literature difficult. The fact that he did not know his father’s
story leads to a long and arduous period of writing: “Neither scapu-
las nor fibulas: I began to write this story nearly twenty years ago in
La Entrada . . . It was a Sunday afternoon in June of 1986, and what
I knew about my father, Zlatica Didič, was still very little, as well as
what I knew about the rain of dead potatoes that befell Netretič the
day of his birth” (228). While the father places the narrator in an inter-
national space by birth, the narrator’s predilection for imported and
translated books places him in an international literary culture. Many
of his literary influences lie outside his Latin American home. As an
adolescent, he trades translated books with his best friend—Around
the World in Eighty Days for a coverless version of The Godfather.
He also reads his aunt’s copies of Faulkner, which places him in the
company of the Boom writers influenced by the American writer.12
Faulkner also is not far removed from his father. The narrator’s aunt
had Faulkner sign her copies of his books on a visit to Venezuela: she
caught him before a speaking engagement, getting off a bus in the
company of the Croatian-Venezuelan writer Salvador Prasel. Prasel
was supposedly a friend of the narrator’s father, and according to
family legend, both served together in the Croatian government.
Reading, rather than a concern about readers, begins young
Zlatica’s writing career. His own reading adds a layer to other writ-
ers’ readings. One day, at age sixteen, he buys a book of Eugenio
Montejo’s poems at a book auction in the center of Valencia. The
margins are filled with notes from Salvador Prasel, who was search-
ing for a photo album his father once had and which is now in the
narrator’s possession. This reading of Prasel’s marginalia in Montejo’s
book prompts the narrator to ask questions about his father at din-
ner that evening, but his mother refuses to answer them. Thus, in
response to questions about his origins, he begins writing. The day
after he buys the book, he turns off the TV he had watched habitu-
ally, and he moves several objects that symbolize his father, writing,
and an international space into his room:
I carried the letters to my room, the letters that my father had aban-
doned the moment he left, along with his pipes, the 1978 World
Almanac, an inflatable globe my aunt had given me with a plastic ver-
sion of The Six Million Dollar Man when I passed second grade, the
Larousse dictionary, a notebook, nearly blank, from the high school
career I had recently finished, three graphite Mongol No. 2 pencils,
the two volumes of William Faulkner’s novels, and obviously, Salvador
Prasel’s photo album. (230)
He sits at his desk and writes the title—“Croatian Circle of Venezuela”

(230)—of the story that eventually turns into “Love Belongs to
Another Port.”
Despite a promising beginning and prolific tendencies—through-
out the story, the narrator writes many drafts—his early texts seem
unclear and insignificant to him, not because he has a lack of readers,

but because he cannot read his source text: the letters that his father
left on top of the television. He lacks the language to access the story
of his past. Thus, the language of his story constantly shifts. The
title suffers “startling metamorphoses nearly every day” (230), and
despite the copious amount of annotations he writes for his story—
some “seven kilos” (231) by the time he leaves for the university—the
story remains “blurred and imprecise” (230). Though Zlatica Didič
has readers, they do not necessarily receive the work the way he wants.
Instead, they share his anxieties about his success in writing. Two
Chilean brothers that he met in a writing workshop ask about his text
before he leaves for the university, but Zlatica finds their readership
frustrating: he thinks they are as doubtful as he is that he will finish
the story.
Readers within his family question his ability to write the story of
his origin, and he struggles to escape their influence. In particular,
he thinks that he should get away from another writer in his family, his
sister “who had torpedoed through her writing” (231) about the same
topic: their father. However, his sister ultimately solves the problem of
what to do with their father’s letters. She suggests, quite practically:
“I’d give them to Salvador, Salvador Prasel, to translate” (232). If
Zlatica is to deal with the problem of his origins, he must engage with
a writer from their literary past. He also must not impose his own
reading on source texts. Zlatica’s initial efforts to translate the letters
himself fail in part because his “Spanish-Croatian dictionary—not
Croatian-Spanish” (233)—began with the target language, rather
than the source. He must study not only the language he writes in
the present, but also the writing of the past. A possible translation
would not only grant the narrator access to his past, but it would also
grant the past a literary existence.
Zlatica soon calls Salvador Prasel, and Prasel questions the mean-
ing that the letters should have without readers and whether they
should be such a burden in the narrator’s life. Prasel agrees to trans-
late the letters, though he claims not to know the narrator’s father
and doubts that the letters’ physical presence alone should influence
the narrator’s writing: “Does it matter that the letters have always
sat in a trunk at your house, if you’ve only been able to smell and
touch them? Do they belong to another attempt at a story?” (233).
In a sense, these letters bear some resemblance to the burden of the
Boom on the Post-Boom writers, at least in relation to some readers,
as something they carry with them whether or not they deliberately
engage with their literary predecessors’ texts. But beyond this, Prasel
questions more than the narrator’s inability to read these letters. He

questions whether anyone has read them, since it seems unusual to
keep copies of letters in addressed envelopes if the letters had indeed
been sent: “[T]o what extent do their recipients exist, and are those
two letters which appear so often, s and p, really my initials?” (233).
Prasel engages questions about readership, and particularly, a recep-
tive and active readership such as that which Trelles discusses in his
prologue. Prasel, as a character, seems to believe that reading mat-
ters to writing, at least in the case of these letters. Writing them had
no significance if they never reached a reader and in particular, the
right reader, the one to whom they were addressed and who could
then enter into what Trelles, in another context, calls an “active
exchange”—in this case, an active, literal exchange of letters.
Just as the letters need to find the right reader, so does Zlatica’s
story, and this right reader turns out to be his father. The father is
the origin the narrator must confront before he stakes out his literary
future. Zlatica finds his lost origin by accident. He does not think
that the purpose of his writing is to find his actual father. At some
point his sister challenges him to meet their father: “She no longer
threatened me with writing a story but now only challenged me with
the prospect of someday embracing our father” (234). But the narra-
tor pays her little mind, as he is more interested now in writing itself,
and writing in translation as a way to find the past. Though he always
carries a folder of his father’s letters with him, it is
perhaps because I’d gotten used to lamenting the impossibility of find-

ing a good translator, or perhaps because they continued to be the
best pretext to grow closer to Prasel, who at this point interested me
much more than Zlatica Didič, especially after I’d spent so long think-
ing about the time he’d stepped out of the Bejuma bus with William
Faulkner. (235)
He seems more committed to literature itself right now than his per-
sonal origins, as has been said more broadly outside the story about
contemporary writers. Prasel always falls ill before they can meet to
translate the letters, and so the narrator never can use their contents
in his story. But further, he loses interest in the letters because his
story has found the wrong readers: “Another reason to explain the
scant interest that my father’s letters inspired in me then was the
wrongful use the Chileans had made of the annotations I’d given
them to read” (235). When the story wins a prize and appears in the
paper, he hopes that Salvador Prasel will read it. But Prasel contracts
another mysterious illness, goes to the hospital, and cannot receive

the newspaper. His father, however, does read the text.
His father’s reading of the story reveals the illusory nature of lan-
guage, writing, and translation. Not only can signified objects can
have multiple signs, as different languages might each have a different
word for “cat,” but the same sign can also point toward different
objects. Zlatica Didič, the son, and Zlatica Didič, the father, are like
translations of each other. Their translation, however, rather than
moving from sign to sign between languages, is a translation from
signified to signified, two different people who refer back to the same
sign—their name. And yet because they share a sign—their name—
they get confused. When the story appears, the father’s friends call
him and ask whether he sent in a photo from his first communion to
the newspaper. The story may or may not point to the actual father.
The narrator asks, “Could it be that this Zlatica Didič, who walked
through the air of a narrative heaven . . . [had] described himself this
way? Magical, strong, and invincible, conjuring enemy power with his
miraculous strength . . . ?” (236). When the father calls the son, the
son also considers it a joke:
“Hello, I’m Zlatica Didič, and I just read a story of yours in PN.”
“Hello, I’m Zlatica Didič, too, and until ten minutes ago I was
watching The Godfather with the departmental film club.” (237)
This moment seems to point to the problematic nature of translation

whereby signs point to other signs, rather than to signified objects in
themselves. Zlatica Didič points to Zlatica Didič, rather than the real
people their names stand for. The son purports to be engaged with
another translated text, that of the movie, The Godfather, which is far
from his own national origins. But the tone of the father’s voice con-
vinces him that this phone call is real, and they arrange to meet.
Zlatica Didič, the son, believes that this encounter with his origins
will help him write the ending to his story, and he tries to write his
story, metaphorically, on the location of the meeting. He arranges
it next to the monolith in the Plaza Bolívar, a spot he believes has
symbolic significance since it is close to the bones of Saint Desiderius,
which he thinks his father brought to Venezuela with Salvador Prasel.
The monolith is a clear symbol of the dominating role his father has
played in his life, however distant and unknown his father has been
to him. At the same time, the narrator has finally arranged a real
meeting with Salvador Prasel, who will translate the letters that will
allow him to interrogate his father properly. Salvador Prasel will make
Zlatica’s, the son’s, past available to the language he writes in the

present. Both of these meetings should confirm or deny the family
legend that Zlatica, the son, tries to invoke in his stories.
The long-awaited personal meetings, however, that were supposed
to solve the narrator’s writing dilemmas instead disappoint him. The
meeting with Salvador Prasel never happens: Prasel dies, mysteriously,
as soon as the narrator rings his doorbell. The meeting with his father
does take place, and though it seems promising at first, it quickly fails
to meet his expectations. At this point the narrator still struggles to
write the text of his origins, but he lacks the words. He still changes
the title of his story every day, and his sister and mother make fun
of him for it. When his father first arrives at the monolith, the meet-
ing seems revelatory, because they recognize each other mutually,
through a shared sign: their names. When the father and the son
greet each other, the son thinks he has found his identity through the
utterance of the word that names them both:
It seemed like all the men in the world were named Zlatica Didič. After
spelling my name for so long, trying to make even one well-educated
ear understand it, begging someone would appear in my lifetime
whose name was at least similar, here, exactly one meter from the front
of the monolith’s base, a scar appeared before me that wasn’t merely
named Zlatica but also, when you asked its last name, repeated, just
like I did, the five letters that my mother would have liked to clear
from my ID. (242)
The unusual text of his name gains a shared significance. The narra-
tor’s particular identity, expressed through a name his mother wanted
to erase, which Spanish-speaking Venezuelans could not pronounce,
attains what seems like a universal sense, or at least intelligibility,
when it is at last placed in its original context.
After this moment of recognition, though, father and son reveal an
inability to read each other. The father does not know why they are
meeting at the monolith. The son tells his father a story that he has
always believed to be true, that he brought Saint Desiderius’s bones to
Venezuela with Salvador Prasel. The father, though, claims not to rec-
ognize these referents: “I don’t know any saint by that name. Besides,
I don’t know who Salvador Prasel is” (242). When the father asks
questions, the narrator refuses to answer them. Their stories do not
intersect; while they share a genetic history, neither is what the other
wants him to be. Soon they are left wordless: “After thirty or forty
minutes had passed, we had nothing left to talk about” (242–243). It
seems that the narrator will not be able to find closure to his story.
Ultimately, however, the letters do get translated by the father, and

they make the narrator’s writing both possible and significant. Before
the father and the son part ways, a verbal slip indicates the father may
be the person his son imagines him to be. The son asks how he got
the scar on his left cheek, and he answers, “A stab from a companion
on the journey on the Castel Verde” (243)—the ship the fictional
Zlatica Didič sailed in the narrator’s story. When they part, the narra-
tor senses that they will never meet again. All the father leaves behind
is a translation:
leaving as his only trace the fulfilled promise of a pack of letters, dia-
ries, and documents, no longer written in Serbo-Croatian, but rather
in a mix of English, French, and Spanish, that arrived at my house after
five days and with which I set out to rewrite my story, or better yet, to
begin a novel. (243)
The narrator’s story begins to gain significance once the right reader,
his father, finds the text. He cannot finish his story until he is able to
read the text of his origin, and it is translation, rather than the meet-
ing with his father itself, that allows him to finally write successfully.
Once he reads the letters, they become a useful source for his story,
rather than a burden. He can now write an original story, rather than
a mere approximation of what he thought the letters contained—
a “Zlatica jr.” not unlike Fresán’s “Boom jr.” Zlatica, father, and
Zlatica, son, may be as different and mutually incomprehensible as
two languages like Spanish and Croatian. However, the reader of one
story—Zlatica, the father—who can translate a past text, his letters,
into the language that his son speaks, adds meaning to the son’s story.
When the son reads the father’s letters and writes a story based on
them, which is published, ostensibly, in the anthology The Future Is
Not Ours—as well as in Zupcic’s 2011 short story collection, Médicos
taxistas, escritores (Doctors, Taxi Drivers, Writers)—then both he and
his father gain more readers. These readers, through the act of read-
ing, add further significance to both the father’s and the son’s texts.
The fact that this story closes an anthology seeking to identify
possible directions for a literary future—or a future literary history—
also lends significance to an interpretation of it. This story offers a
particular model of readership, and that model is limited, to some
extent, by its particular characters and plot and its fictional nature.
Nor is this story by any means the only one by a Post-Boom writer to
struggle with the question of a literary past.13 After acknowledging
this text’s limitations, however, the story may still provide some, even
if not all, possible answers to the question of how a writer might deal
with the past, as well as to the question of how readers should deal
with the literary past and interact with a contemporary writer’s text. It
also points to the different tasks of reading, writing, and translating,
and begins to suggest the role of each in a discussion of posterity and
inclusion in an international literary sphere.
It is useful to remember that the two Zlaticas—the son, who never
meant to publish the early drafts of his story, and the father, who may
have never mailed his letters—never sought readers for their written
work. In contrast, translation is specifically directed toward reader-
ship. It has, as a goal, comprehensibility in the target language, and
it also expands the potential audience of a written work. Casanova, as
we have seen, explains how translation into a major literary language
like French can usher a literary work into the body of world litera-
ture. In Why Translation Matters, Edith Grossman makes a similar
argument. She concedes that one reason writers write is to pursue
as large an audience as possible, but she argues further that transla-
tion, in addition to writing, may help them achieve a large number
of readers: “Translation expands that number exponentially, allowing
more and more readers to be touched by an author’s work” (14). She
also notes that translation plays a large role in the posterity Trelles
addresses in his prologue and in the world republic of letters that
Casanova reveals. A book must be translated into English to even be
considered for the Nobel Prize, for instance, “because English is the
one language all the judges can read” (15). Like Casanova, she might
credit translation in part for the Boom’s global impact. Today, con-
temporary readers in the international literary market may approach
Latin American literature through the lens of a particular reading
of the Boom because that is the only Latin American literature they
know. Translation might not only grant contemporary writers more
readers, but it also may have some part in teaching readers not to
expect a “Boom jr.” by increasing their exposure to other and differ-
ent writers. For instance, Lawrence Venuti observes how translations
from the Boom writers formed “a new canon of foreign literature in
English as well as a more sophisticated readership” of Latin American
literature and furthermore influenced contemporary fiction in the
United States (169). Translation has the potential to create the kind
of reader a book might need.
But what role do readers, especially global readers, have in the
reception of a globalized work? What makes a good reader? I would
argue that the reader has a responsibility to bring the richness of
the past into his or her reading of present, even if he or she does not
expect the present to replicate some particularly well-written text of

the past. Julio Ortega points to two kinds of reading or interpretation
in his essay, “Scenes of the Twenty-First Century: The Routes of the
New.” The first kind of interpretation, which he calls genealogical
interpretation, seeks to reconstruct the origins of a text. The second,
oriented through process, aims to read toward discovery and seek
signs of the new (636). The two kinds of interpretation need not be
mutually exclusive. Regardless of the author’s intent, or the intent
of the literary critic, the reader always brings his or her own reading
history and the traces of all that he or she has read—that is, his or her
own literary origins—into an encounter with any text. The reader is
not a blank page on which the author can write. Instead, the reader,
rather than the author, is the place where all allusions and literary
history coexist. This is what Barthes affirms in “The Death of the
Author”: “[A] text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”
(82). Trelles, in a sense, echoes Barthes when he attributes to readers
some of the significance of a writer’s work. This significance stems
from each reader’s experience and expectations in his or her own lan-
guage. Just as “literary translation infuses a [target] language with
influences, alterations, and combinations that would not have been
possible without the presence of translated foreign literary styles and
perceptions,” as Grossman writes (16), each reader also enriches the
literary work by bringing to it influences, alterations, and combina-
tions that the author may not have intended.
The task of the translator, like the task of the critic, is the task of
the reader: to find the meaning in the text that the writer tries to
express but cannot because of the inherent limitations of language
and art. Walter Benjamin argues that art tries to express the inex-
pressible: “In all language and linguistic creations there remains in
addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be com-
municated” (261). He calls that incommunicable something “pure
language.” The translator’s task is to represent the echo of unheard,
inexpressible language in his or her own language: “It is the task
of the translator to release in his own language that pure language
which is under the spell of another, to liberate that language impris-
oned in a work through his re-creation of that work” (261). Piece by
piece and word by word, translators, who are a literary work’s closest
readers, follow the writers’ architectural design to house the inex-
pressible meaning of a text.
If it is true, as Trelles suggests, that contemporary writers have
made an unconditional pact with fiction, that means that the writers
have committed to a cause that will betray them. If the traduttore,
a translator, is indeed a traditore, a traitor, as the Italian saying

goes, that is only because the homeland of language always betrays
its inhabitants. Language is slippery: each word contains traces of
other words and their meanings, and the meaning of language and
the reception of any work of literature changes between readers and
over time. Any efforts to know a heterogeneous Latin America or
Latin American fictions through the region’s languages and litera-
tures must be imperfect. As Roberto González Echevarría writes in
The Voice of the Masters, “The only way to gain access to a Latin
American literary mythology is through the very language of litera-
ture, but the price to pay for that journey is the acceptance of the
inherently subversive nature of that language” (13). Readers’ misin-
terpretations or approximate interpretations of a writer’s intent are
a natural consequence of the subversive medium through which the
writer works, language.
Because of the same limitations of language and subjectivity, nei-
ther reading nor translation can counteract writing’s unstable foun-
dation, nor can they glue together the fragments of a shifting and
globalized world that may never have been stable or whole to begin
with. While readers and translators may gather the pieces of a writer’s
literary intent, they cannot ever say what the writer meant to say, sim-
ply because that “pure language” does not exist. Paul de Man notes
that the English version of “The Task of the Translator” erroneously
translates Benjamin as saying that the fragments of language in trans-
lation can point to an ideal whole. Harry Zohn’s translation reads:
In the same way a translation, instead of imitating the sense of the

original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of
meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recogniz-
able as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of
a vessel. (260)
De Man notes that Benjamin’s original version of this passage con-

cludes, “just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel” (emphasis
added, 91). The subjectivity and fragmentation that contemporary
critics claim for contemporary writing are, in fact, not new phenom-
ena. They are not postmodern conditions; instead, they are conditions
inherent to literature and language in themselves. De Man writes,
“[T]here was no vessel in the first place, or we have no knowledge
of this vessel, or no awareness, no access to it, so for all intents and
purposes there never was one” (91). The unifying novel that the Post-
Boom readers expect, in fact, never existed.
So why do contemporary writers or their editors announce their

rupture with the past? It seems they must defend the fragmentary
nature of their work, because many readers have mistaken the Boom
writers’ fragment of the vessel for the vessel itself. But it cannot be the
vessel, no matter how large and lovely their fragment is. Every literary
work and every narrative leaves many things unsaid, and the passage
of time brings more new and unarticulated things into the world. This
is why writers continue to write. What use can a fragment be without
a vessel? I would argue that the fragment is a talisman of hope. We
write and read because of our unconditional pact, not with language,
but with a fiction: an idea unproven by any literary work itself, but an
idea that still exists at some point in every writer’s and reader’s imagi-
nation: that this time, we might make lasting sense out of the chaos;
this time, if we collect the right fragments and arrange them in a new
and different way, they might finally snap into a whole.
Notes
1. The book Palabra de América (Word from America) contains the
speeches given at a 2003 literary conference in Seville sponsored by
Seix Barral, in which many of the major Post-Boom writers partici-
pated. A common thread running through several of the speeches is
a rejection of the international market’s grouping of Latin American
writers in a uniform and magical realist block.
2. Casanova uses this term to describe the commercial viability that pub-
lishers have found in certain varieties of postcolonial Commonwealth
or francophonie literature that employ outmoded literary techniques
to narrate exotically located stories, stating, “The vogue for exoticism
was so great that publishers—particularly in the United States—
moved quickly to manufacture bestsellers for an international pub-
lic” (121). This statement might apply equally to a Post-Boom Latin
American literature designed to meet commercial expectations in the
United States and elsewhere.
3. In this chapter I use the term Post-Boom chronologically to refer
generally to Latin American literature written after the Boom rather
than any particular movement.
4. The anthology has gone through several publications. It began in
2007 as a free electronic anthology published in the Colombian
magazine Pie de página and featured stories by sixty-three authors
from sixteen countries. In 2009, a print version featuring twenty
authors from fourteen countries was published in Argentina by
Eterna Cadencia. Since then, the book has been published in Bolivia
(La Hoguera), Chile (UQBAR), Hungary (L’Harmattan), Panama
(Fugalibros), Mexico (SurPlus), Peru (Madriguera), and the United
States (Open Letter).
5. The perspective put forth in the prologue belongs, of course, to the

anthologist in his editorial role, and not necessarily to the writers
within, as Trelles is careful to note: the title of the volume is one
“for which I alone am responsible and which, just like the contents
of this introduction, does not necessarily represent the opinions of its
authors” (xiii).
6. This may be particularly true for Granta’s Best of Young Spanish
Language Novelists issue, published simultaneously in English and
Spanish with the aim of promoting its writers to a worldwide literary
audience.
7. Casanova discusses the Boom writers’ literal and metaphorical pas-
sage through Paris in relation to her arguments about the distribu-
tion of literary power and status. She writes: “The writers of the Latin
American ‘boom,’ for example, began to exist in international literary
space only with their translation into French and their recognition
by French critics” (135). Though this observation largely ignores the
commercial success the writers enjoyed within Latin America, it is
not meant to negate it.
8. Casanova connects translation and innovation, arguing that access to
works from other nations and other languages is essential to a writer’s
ability to remain current, and therefore relevant. Writers’ ongoing
redefinition of modernity “depends to some extent on their familiar-
ity with the most recent innovations in form and technique” (91).
9. Fresán parodies the commodification of Latin American writers in
his speech included in Palabra de América, beginning with his satiri-
cal title, “Notes (and a Few Footnotes) Toward a Theory of Stigma:
Pages Taken from the Possible Diary of an Almost Ex-Young South
American Writer.”
10. Throughout her book, Casanova discusses the work of the Yugoslav
writer Danilo Kiš, whose case may have some relevance to Zupcic’s
story. One might argue in the context of this story that the transla-
tion of a minor literary language, Croatian, into a major literary lan-
guage, Spanish, grants the father’s marginalized past a literary, and
a nonliterary, legitimacy.
11. Among these writers are Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Juan Carlos
Onetti, Mario Vargas Llosa, though “his relationship to Gabriel
García Márquez has been by far the favorite subject” in the critical
literature, as Deborah Cohn notes (154). She provides a good review
of the literature documenting Faulkner’s influence on the Boom
writers in her article “ ‘He Was One of Us’: The Reception of William
Faulkner and the U.S. South by Latin American Authors” (153–156,
167–168).
12. Lyotard writes, “Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narra-
tive. It in no way follows that they are reduced to barbarity. What saves
them from it is their knowledge that legitimation can only spring from
their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction” (41).
Lyotard here refers to linguistic practice and “language games” in a

broad sense, which include the languages of science, music, and so
on. But linguistic practice may also include the language game of lit-
erature within a particular language, such as Spanish, or the game of
literature as played out between a writer and his or her interpretive
community of readers.
13. Further examples of such metanarratives can be found in the Post-
Boom anthologies referenced in this chapter. For instance, The Future
Is Not Ours opens with a story, “Sun-Woo,” by Oliverio Coelho, in
which the protagonist, a mediocre, forty-year-old Argentine writer,
disappears to South Korea after a trip to Paris on which he finds
that his first translation into French has received virtually no critical
attention.
Bibliography
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trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142–148.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Selected Writings. Ed.
Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Trans. Harry Zohn. Vol. 1,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 253–263.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Cohn, Deborah. “ ‘He Was One of Us’: The Reception of William Faulkner
and the U.S. South by Latin American Authors.” Comparative Literature
Studies 34.2 (1997): 149–169. Web. August 17, 2013. JSTOR. http://
www.jstor.org
De Man, Paul. “ ‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the
Translator.’ ” The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986. 73–105.
Fuguet, Alberto, and Sergio Gómez. “Presentación del país McOndo.”
McOndo. Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996. 9–18.
González Echevarría, Roberto. The Voice of the Masters: Writing and
Authority in Modern Latin American Literature. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1985.
Grossman, Edith. Why Translation Matters. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984.
Major, Aurelio, and Valerie Miles. “Forward.” Granta 113 (2010): 7–10.
Ortega, Julio. “Scenes of the Twenty-First Century: The Routes of the
New.” Trans. Jessica Johnson. Literary Cultures of Latin America: A
Comparative History. Ed. Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir. Vol. 3. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 633–640.
Padilla, Ignacio. “McOndo y el crack: dos experiencias grupales.” Palabra de
América. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2004. 136–147.
Readings, Bill. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. New York: Routledge,
1991.
Trelles Paz, Diego. “Prologue.” The Future Is Not Ours. Trans. Janet
Hendrickson. Rochester: Open Letter, 2012. ix–xxvi.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of
Difference. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Zupcic, Slavko. “Love Belongs to Another Port.” The Future Is Not Ours.
Trans. Janet Hendrickson. Rochester: Open Letter, 2012. 228–243.
Chapter 9
Multiple Names and Time Superposition:

No Anxiety in the Electronic Poetics of
Yolanda Arroyo and Diego Trelles
Eduard Arriaga-Arango
I n his migrated and almost dead blog, Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet
announced the end of the format as a tool for writing and sharing
personal thoughts. Ironically, he publishes this statement as a blog
post entitled “¿El fin de los blogs? El fin, al menos de éste” (Is This
the End of Blogs? It is the End, at Least of This One) (“Apuntes”).
Such a post is supposed to be the closing-on-a-high-note gesture for
a blog that started in 2005. By closing this door, Fuguet opens a
new window through which he argues that blogs are dying due to
the obsolescence of the format—based on plain writing—and to the
impossibility of keeping up with the rapid development of newer and
faster technologies (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram). In his opin-
ion, we are still in a moment of “Images at War” (Gruzinski) where the
interest of communicating through images becomes overwhelming in
comparison with the strategies of transmission and communication
employed by the well-known writing tradition.1 However, the end of
one cycle marks a new beginning that, in Fuguet’s case, is not as new
as it could be: he decides to quit writing literary blogs and become
a kind of independent film producer through a website committed
to show, promote, distribute, and allow collaboration between inde-
pendent filmmakers and the film-making community.2 Ironically, he
abandons the ship of blog-writing and decides to take part in another
world, one that he views as being responsible for the demise of the
former format: the world of pure motion-image. It is worthwhile
to mention that his Web page, as many of the pages that feed the
so-called Web 2.0, is based on a hybrid construction of match-ups,
blog-style format, social network dynamic, and advertising page.3
192 E d ua r d A r r i ag a - A r a n g o
Fuguet’s action could be deemed as a symbolic initiative that repre-

sents the vision of contemporary Latin American writers and literary
agents at large. However, we are witnessing a more continuous and
productive relationship between writing and digital technology—
whether in blogs, personal pages, social networks, or mobile devices.
Groups, organizations, and initiatives such as Electronic Literature
(ELO), Hermeneia research group from the University of Barcelona,
Africa Digital Art (ADA), or Literatronic, as well as a handful of artis-
tic works that combine traditional methodologies with digital writ-
ing and digital culture, show that symbiotic dynamic relationships
between writing and digital technologies are becoming widely spread
around the world. Blogs, and also digital technology at large, have
become important in the development of artistic poetics as seen in the
works of artists like Jorge Volpi, Iván Thays, Yolanda Arroyo, Diego
Trelles Paz, Santiago Roncagliolo, and Edmundo Paz Soldán. For
these writers, digital tools have not only allowed them to share their
messages but they have also become writing labs where they build
new proposals—spaces to both disseminate their literary vision and
defy traditional means of literary communication.
This chapter aims to show how writers such as Yolanda Arroyo
Pizarro (Puerto Rico) and Diego Trelles Paz (Peru) use digital tools
to create literary proposals that are the result of a contemporary vision
of the relationship between literature and technology. As Angel Rama
stated in La ciudad letrada (The Lettered City, 1984), quoting Walter
Benjamin’s Illuminations, writers’ literary attitudes are closely linked
to social and economic structures and therefore they become personal
actions and reactions toward given social orders. My objective is to
show how these writers use the potential of digital tools to construct
literary projects that respond to specific issues in contemporary liter-
ary, communicative, and social fields, while they at the same time cre-
ate networks that reach across time and space. Their literary works are
clearly connected with Latin American literary traditions—as well as
with other Western and non-Western traditions—without experienc-
ing any “anxiety of the influence” (Bloom).
In Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred
Years of Solitude, 1967), Melquíades brings a telescope and a mag-
nifying glass as one of the latest inventions to show to the natives of
Macondo. He explains that thanks to this gadget “science has elimi-
nated distance” (3). In a prediction mixed with subterfuge and scien-
tific certitudes, this gypsy, who periodically comes to José Arcadio
Buendía’s town, assures his audience that “in a short time, man will
be able to see what is happening in any place of the world without
M u lt i p l e N a me s a n d T i me S u p e r p o s i t i o n 193
leaving his own house” (12). This passage shows what Brian Conniff
has called the “two purposes of scientific discoveries in [García
Márquez’s] novel: science will mystify the citizens of Macondo and will
lead to their exploitation” (172). Although one could not argue that
Melquíades is describing the Internet, it is clear that García Márquez
uses the relationship between characters such as José Arcadio Buendía,
Melquíades, and the natives of Macondo, along with the inventions
brought by the gypsies, to question technological development as a
way to perpetuate colonial impositions. García Márquez criticizes not
the inventions and the technological development in itself, but their
appropriation and use by Latin American and Colombian central gov-
ernments. One could read the passage as a critique of a technological
colonialism imposed on Latin America and the third world at large.
According to Conniff, the only way for García Márquez to advance
this aesthetic proposal was through magical realism as a style that
allowed the author to represent a paradoxically real magical relation-
ship between progress and tradition (172).
Several decades after its publication, readers and critics alike
still remember the magical and fantastic literary images of García
Márquez’s proposal, but tend to forget the message behind the aston-
ishing events masterfully described in the text. This metonymic obliv-
ion led some to think of one author and one style as the original and
fundamental voice of an entire culture, or even worse, led readers to
think of one writer as the representative of varied cultures coexisting
under the tag “Latin America.” In any case, García Márquez’s magical
realism became widely adopted as the main aesthetic to represent an
image of the Latin American. Such representation, then, was ideally
constructed as a conjunction of magical events described in an exotic
manner and clearly opposed to any trace of technological develop-
ment as well as distanced from an urban cosmopolitan space. Readers
and writers hoping to find something properly called Latin American
were bound to a magical representation where technology seemed to
be an anathema that clearly defies the established order of societies
based on oral traditions and narrative accounts. If you could not write
as a magical realist, you could not be a Latin American writer.
Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez took advantage of the gap
between the universalized image of Latin America seen through mag-
ical realism and the reality that governed cities and countries in the
region. What they do in their now classic and over quoted prologue is
to create a space of contestation against an image that depicted Latin
America as an exotic place. They seem to fight isolation by entering
into what Rory O’Bryen has called “magical neoliberalism” or the
effects of globalization in a Latin America characterized as a world

where there are “MacDonald’s, Macintosh personal computers, and
condominiums as well as five-star hotels and gigantic malls built on
laundered money” (161). Contrary to García Márquez’s magical real-
ism, and his constant foreign and local adaptations to represent Latin
America as a cultural reality, these writers embrace technology from
a neoliberal global-local perspective.
Embracing technology—especially digital technology—and com-
modities as concrete manifestations of globalization entails the cre-
ation of new artistic spaces, new ways to narrate stories and understand
them from a more contemporary Latin American perspective. From
Rosario Ramos González’s standpoint—which focuses mainly on Paz
Soldán’s work—these writers create an “electronic fable” that tries
to mediate between the fear of accepting technology and blind faith
in it as the solution to end inequality, colonialism, and geopolitical
discrimination (470). In addition, the “electronic fable” sets up a dia-
logue between former literary traditions and contemporary proposals
that are in a continuous process of recreating and reordering cultural
spaces. Paz Soldán’s Sueños digitales (Digital Dreams, 2000) and
El delirio de Turing (Turing’s Delirium, 2006)—works that give flesh
to the ideas stated in the famous prologue of McOndo anthology—are
two novels that exemplify Ramos González’s idea of “digital fable.”
In these texts, Bolivia and Latin America—continuing with the met-
onymic perception—are initially portrayed as places where issues such
as dictatorship and governmental impositions continue to happen,
but this time they are accompanied by technological and futuris-
tic images. Readers of these texts will inevitably question the role
of body, culture, and history in the conceptualization of humanity
at large and Latin American culture in particular. Paz Soldán and
other McOndo writers are trying to identify and denounce social,
cultural, and colonial issues that menace Latin America’s cultural and
economic independence in a dependency era; issues that, from differ-
ent perspectives, previous literary and intellectual generations have
also denounced. The difference is not only that these writers embrace
technology as a part of the reality they want to describe or invent, but
that they also adopt different literary styles to describe their absurd
reality from varied perspectives: the realistic and bukowskian lowlife
narrative, the fantastic urban vision—borrowed from Borges and from
William Gibson’s cyberpunk proposal in Neuromancer (1984)—as
well as a narrative reload of the beat generation’s aesthetics. From the
McOndo authors’ perspective, Latin America is no longer looking
for its identity through a magical and restrictive tradition but, on the
contrary, it is a region that lives in the present. They seem to embrace

a motto that might sound something like “here we are, as a regional
locality in the global world of commodities.” Digital technology,
communication technology, and its divisions, of course, are part of
the artistic representation proposed by these writers.
A decade later or more, however, the dream seems to come to an
end. When Fuguet announces the end of the blogs, at least from a
literary perspective, he wonders where the blogs went, especially in
a cultural age when people are more interested in sending messages
and expressing feelings through popular social networks. Fuguet
asks, as a rhetorical question, “Where did all the energy, the words,
the digital poetry, and those three-in-the-morning confessions go?”
(“Apuntes”). In response, he argues that values such as simplicity and
speed of use mark the trend for the adoption of new technologies
in order to create literary pieces that replace what blogs used to do.
Fuguet seems to reject the new paths of digital writing based on his
perception of writing as a more classical practice with particular syn-
tax and time management. He says he likes writing downward rather
than assuming the practice of writing in multilinear and multilayered
ways. This assertion marks a return to a classic perspective of writing
in which books, syntax, and ways of communication differ from those
foreseen in his famous prologue for the McOndo anthology.
Despite Fuguet’s disillusionment with blogs and digital technol-
ogy to create literature, there is an increasing interest not only in the
relationship, but also in the potential these tools offer for the creation
of literature and its distribution. Contrary to Fuguet’s vision, writ-
ers who have experienced Internet-based digital technologies have
started to create not only multimedia literary pieces that defy the
classical concept of literature as well as the traditional way to read
it but also have connected their proposals with the literary masters
who inspired them. These tools allow them to network with their
peers located around the region or even around the world as well
as with literary figures that greatly influence their own work. Latin
American contemporary writers are not looking at these tools just as
a medium to visualize the work they traditionally did on paper; they
look at them as an alternative to inquiry literary practices, as well to
experiment unconventional ways of writing, advertising, and acquir-
ing symbolic power. In the blog Web page where she creates and
disseminates much of her work, Yolanda Arroyo presents her politi-
cal and aesthetic position as a good example of this use. Likewise,
for Daniel Trelles Paz, as anthologist and writer of one of the most
recent Internet-published anthologies of Latin American narrative,
El futuro no es nuestro (The Future is Not Ours, 2011), cyberspace

plays an important role in helping to advance alternative proposals
and connect writers from across Latin America, which he sees as a
disconnected region. Both of them adopt interesting political posi-
tions and propose aesthetic visions made of innovation and recovery
of artistic traditions that go beyond the limits of a strictly imagined
Latin America.
Felix Guattari in his essay, “A Liberation of Desire” (1979),
describes literary work as a machine. He states, “there is no longer a
tripartition between a field of reality (the world), a field of representa-
tion (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author), but an arrange-
ment of places in connection, certain multiplicities taken from each
of these orders” (65). This is precisely the way literature is currently
working and the way authors, engaged in what could be seen as the
“digital turn,” are trying to expand a field governed by the elites and
based on restricted communicative circuits and modes of expression.4
The writers we will focus on in this chapter take advantage of this
contemporary cultural landscape in order to build a more accessible
and open work.
Yolanda Arroyo is a contemporary Puerto Rican writer whose work
has been widely published. She was considered one of the 39 most
promising Latin American writers in the festival convened by the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) and HEY Festival Organization in 2006 in Bogota.5
Since then, she has forged a literary career that has passed through
several stages: combining feminism, racial concern, and political
nationalism for Puerto Rican autonomy in the contemporary politi-
cal scene. However, a close relationship with digital tools and digital
technology has always marked her work. It is not only evident in her
professional background—she works as Instructor of Educational
Technology—but also in the configuration of her literary work: most
of her poems and short stories, even the themes for her novels, are
tested in her personal blog. She establishes fluid and creative com-
munication with her own network trying to test and measure the
readability of her works. Additionally, her website serves as a space
for cultural dissemination where she advertises her own and others’
work, making her literary work a dynamic structure of constant con-
nection and collaboration.6
However, her technological literary production relies heavily on
both a specific conceptual structure and her own aesthetic journey.
Arroyo’s literary and cultural agency work is based on three main
ideas. The first is related to the endless discussion of identity and the
capacity of art to represent hybridization and multiple identities. The

second, which is related to the first, has to do with the creation of
linguistic forms that question defined and one-dimensional identities
and, at the same time, aim at portraying culturally intermingled and
emergent identifications. Finally, for Arroyo the body and sexuality
serve as two crucial elements in her literary and cultural works. She
seeks to unveil voices, entities, and beings that the symbolic powers
that constantly act in our lives have ignored, making them essentially
disappear.
In terms of identity, Arroyo engages in the Caribbean tradi-
tion, especially the traditional of critical dialogue that tried to build
national unity and identity as a response to the expansion of colonial-
ism. Arroyo reactivates what Martinican writer, Edouard Glissant,
has called “Caribbean discourse” understood as the metanarrative
that takes form in the wake of the Spanish–American War and the
numerous and continuous US interventions in the area (Heller 391).
Her perspective continues the productive critical dialogue of writ-
ers such as Antonio Pedreira, Tomás Blanco, Fernando Ortiz, José
Lezama Lima, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Dereck Walcott who,
according to Ben Heller, have
posited a close relationship between nature and cultural identity,

finding the roots of the distinguishing characteristics of Caribbean
culture(s) in the surrounding environment. [These writers and cul-
tural agents had] the tendency to figure the shaping environment as
female, or with qualities such as fluidity and relationality that have
often been associated with women, femininity, and the female body in
both patriarchal and feminist discourses. (391)
Arroyo, from her particular perspective as a Puerto Rican lesbian

writer, contests the creation, dissemination and, to a certain extent,
imposition of this metaphor. Antonio Pedreira’s Insularismo seems to
be seminal in her formulation of an alternative Caribbean identity, its
relation to the female and the landscape, and its consequent artistic
representation through literature.
In 1934, Antonio Pedreira published his classic text Insularismo,
a well-known essay that discusses Puerto Rican identity. Echoes of
positivism as well as political independence for the island resonate
throughout the essay, whose main goal seems to be to define Puerto
Rico in the crossroads of both Hispanic colonialism and American
neocolonialism. With an unclear objective in mind, Pedreira asks a
question (“Who are we?”) that leads him to discuss various points as
an attempt to understand what it means to be Puerto Rican. Pedreira’s
conclusions were widely accepted and for a long time have become
part of the Puerto Rican tradition.7 This implies that Insularimo’s
views on land, race, progress, and education as well as isolation were
considered by many as real and visible in the Puerto Rican context.
One of the most important points Pedreira argued had to do
with the “melting-pot” the island had become at that time. With
so many cultural contexts coming together through the processes of
migration and colonialism, Pedreira deemed that “the fusing of races
causes confusion” (31). Some commentators such as Fernández, in
his article “No somos antillanos” (“We Are Not Antillean”) interpret
this statement as the result of political opposition to annexationist
leaders—the majority of whom were of Afro descent—and therefore
as a political strategy to set forward a nationalist view. Others argue
that Insularismo could be read as a text that promotes cultural syncre-
tism and mulatez because of its focus on the intersection between sci-
ence and poetry, primitivism and civilization, universality and locality
(Fernández).8 However, from my point of view, Insularismo is one
of the outcomes of the Puerto Rican intelligentsia that, in the first
three decades of the twentieth century, searched for national prog-
ress, unification, and Westernization employing social Darwinism as
its core philosophy. It implies that authors such as Pedreira or Palés
Matos created their work with a sort of language imposition that fal-
sifies or obscures cultural diversity and gender acceptance, creating
at the same time a generalized need for clarification, transparency,
and a lineal representation of Puerto Rican culture in order to fight
confusion.
Authors such as José Luis González through his El país de cuatro
pisos y otros ensayos (Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country and
Other Essays, 1980), and Luis Rafael Sánchez with La guaracha del
macho Camacho (Macho Camacho’s Beat, 1976) have opened the
door to question this tradition, with its desire for linguistic transpar-
ency, from the 1930s and 1940s. For her part, Mayra Santos paves
the way for questioning the role of women, especially black women,
within Pedreira’s scheme. In discussing the poem “Majestad Negra”
by Palés Matos, Santos proposes that black women, when considered,
are “transformed into the object of a detached gaze which depicts
her alleged corporeal exuberance in magical, erotic and prohibited
dimensions” (Godreau 2). If women within Insularismo and the rest
of Puerto Rican cultural production from the 1930s and 1940s is
just a shadow, black woman becomes an absurdity, the pure proof of
the condemned blending of cultures as the point of origin for confu-
sion. Although, as Magali Roy-Féquiere shows in her Women, Creole
Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto

Rico (2004), women intellectuals of Pedreira’s period such as Margot
Arce, María Cadillo de Martínez, and Concha Meléndez, were pillars
for the “Generación del Treinta,” their voices as well as those from
women of color were neglected in order to construct a Puerto Rican,
Caribbean, and Latin American masculine subject who would fight
for their freedom to impose classifications without external impo-
sitions (7). Their main preoccupation, as mentioned above, was to
forge a national identity based on metaphors of landscape and terri-
tory as feminine entities.
It is precisely in this gap where Arroyo creates her work based on
the revision, consideration, and fictionalization of voices that have
been ignored. For her, the alleged confusion does not come from a
blending of cultures but from their negation. Instead of “who are
we?” the question implicitly raised by Insularismo is “Who is the
subject that gets confused?” Arroyo responds by affirming, through
her work, that the hybridity Perreira criticized is creation and cre-
ativity instead of confusion. The voices of those whom the nation
ignored, in an effort to erase them from its symbolic identity, have
lived in a world of intermingling and coexistence. Arroyo’s advocacy
for diversity is clearly defined in her characters, as well as in her liter-
ary proposal.
In her website as in her print work, Arroyo makes evident her
vision of cultural diversity as a value to be followed and represented
in literary terms. Her novels Los documentados (The Documented,
2007) and Caparazones (Shells, 2010), as well as her poetry and
short story anthologies—las Negras (The Black Women, 2012), Saeta
(2011), Delineador (Eyeliner, 2010), and Ojos de la luna (The Moon’s
Eyes, 2007)—show the way she plays with searching for and ques-
tioning imposed identities. Most of her characters are mobile indi-
viduals with more than one identity since they are inhabitants of
diverse borderlands in both symbolic and material terms. Such char-
acters are not looking for a specific identity but trying to affirm the
option of having more than one. In this regard, Stuart Hall, speak-
ing of identity, diaspora, and difference, states “We cannot speak for
very long, with any exactness, about ‘one experience, one identity’,
without acknowledging its other side” (“Cultural Identity” 225).
He continues to say “[I]dentities are never unified and, in late mod-
ern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured: never singular but
multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antago-
nistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radi-
cal historization, and are constantly in the process of change and
transformation” (“Who Needs” 4). Nessa, the constantly migrating

protagonist of Caparazones who works as a freelance journalist inves-
tigating ecological disasters, is like the turtles that serve as metaphor
for the entire novel. She has no nation of her own and therefore has
no unified nor clearly defined identity.
Name is as important as nationality for constructing one’s identity.
With this concept in mind, Arroyo proposes a poetics of multiple
names in order to blur established boundaries of identification and
identity imposition. In her poem “New Slave Names” from Saeta,
Arroyo represents the process of imposing historic, cultural, and
racial identities by imposing a given name. She says:
Thanswe is now Teresa

Jwaabi is Juana
[ . . . ]
they do not dare to look at my eyes
their heads move
but they do not respond
not in front of the amos. (28)
In this text Arroyo shows how slaves and colonial subjects have been
identified, classified, and ordered by imposing names on them. Such
imposition does not entail the loss of an identity but rather the loss
of a voice within the realm of multiple names and multiple identities.
She attempts to become a voice for those who have been neglected.
For this reason, she adopts the use of digital tools and networking
technology in order to create a space and a time in which voices that
have disappeared can reappear and tell their story. She focuses on
what Mike Crang calls “the small scale of the daily life reality” (65),
working on a particular vision of time and space that may be flex-
ible or may be intrusive as the new construction of networked time
and temporality (Crang 74). But these very characteristics make her
way of producing literary proposals an effective strategy to question
rigid impositions of identities and representations. For Arroyo, work-
ing and making literature within the contemporary network of mass
communication entails the use of e-mail, blogs, electronic writing,
the use of images, and the creation of connections and new hubs to
propose new temporalities or, at least, rediscover forms of time and
identity that have been repressed.
This process would not be complete without the creation of a
particular language. Arroyo strives to create something that I call
“lesbian language” as a concept grounded in Brathwaite’s classical
term “nation language” but concerned with complex issues within

the dissemination of nation (Bhabha). Yolanda Arroyo’s “lesbian lan-
guage” tries to cast light even on the darker side of the darkened
side of history, feminine-marginal-Afro-Latin American history and
cultural representation. She proposes a type of linguistic image that,
taking advantage of the hybrid origin of language and culture in the
Caribbean, Latin America, and other colonial locations, represents
gaps that have been overlooked even for marginal members whose
minds and concepts have largely been possessed by a system of patri-
archy and colonialism.
According to Brathwaite, nation language is the language “of the
submerged, surrealist experience and sensibility, which has always
been there and which is now increasingly coming to the surface
and influencing the perception of contemporary Caribbean people”
(History 266). Yolanda Arroyo’s work is an example of this process of
emergence and pervasiveness of submerged language over imposed
colonial discourse to name and give order to a particular reality. Saeta
is a book whose aesthetic proposal is grounded in the combination
of rhythms and words in English, Spanish, French, and Swahili in a
productive relationship. For instance, in “Menstruo/hedhi,” the first
part of the book, in the poem “The master walks around us, Jwaabi”
the poetic voice says:
the sound of my voice is not maraca

not flute
there is no sound, actually
ngoma moropa balapho power (24)
This poem speaks not only about colonial imposition, but also about
the previously silenced voices that employ linguistic nuances to subvert
colonialism. In terms of the poem there is a silence that claims and
erodes the noise of language: it is the sound of the silence produced
by the “brave guerrera,” a woman-warrior who fights not with tradi-
tional weapons but with linguistic and symbolic subversion. This is
a female figure that traverses Arroyo’s work sometimes fighting with
symbols, sometimes physically fighting against colonial imposition.
In her short story “Matronas,” a brave guerrera creates an army that
tries to defy the slave trade from inside; she and others will kill white
newborns that would be tomorrow’s masters (las Negras 63–95).
However, Arroyo’s proposal goes beyond nation language as a uni-
versalized and pan-Antillean linguistic and cultural dynamic. Silenced
languages are as important as the silences within them and this is the
main concern for Arroyo. Brathwaite does not question these hidden
silences as his proposal is anchored in a male perspective in which the
widely accepted representation of enslaved people is related to a pre-
dominance of masculine figures. In contrast, Arroyo’s poem praises
the black enslaved women, whose role continues to be doubly and
even triply silenced in social discourses and symbolic manifestations.
She defies even woman as a category and concept (name) that has
been imposed on diverse subjects no matter their ethnicity, culture,
or beliefs, to maintain a particular order. Arroyo does so through the
use of a language full of blood, menstruation, and lunar poetry. A lan-
guage that is aware of the impositions and, at the same time, plays
with the many names and guises that black-women-enslaved-lesbian-
heterosexual individuals have been assigned. This is precisely what we
call a “lesbian language” as opposed to a nation-male language. Her
lesbian language accepts and plays with official languages, names,
silences, and silences within the silence, giving women and double
marginalized people a central position in the process of resistance and
creation of alternative worlds. The “lesbian language” allows her to
come to the realization of what Gloria Anzaldúa proposed as a lesbian
vision: “I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races
because there is the queer of me in all races” (767). This is precisely
what Arroyo looks for in terms of diversity through her work: the cre-
ation of a network that links darkened spaces through the adoption of
an intercultural concept of both writing and political activism.9
Regarding the representation of the body and corporeality, Roberto
Cipriani argues that
The 20th Century was defined as the century of the body according to
the major attention paid to all the aspects of corporeality, so to make
of it a sort of religion of the body. Besides, the media and the new
means of diffusion for the works of art have highly contributed to the
increase of such a new phenomenon. (vii)
In this sense, Arroyo’s concerns with the body and its representations
may be understood as another element playing a fundamental role in
her conceptual framework. She establishes a constant game with body
images in her digital writing as well as in her printed work. From
images of enslaved bodies to bodies that are not easily classifiable,
Arroyo proposes a literature of hybrid bodies that, beyond classic tags
and stereotypes—woman, man, female, male—looks to break down
traditional unilateral definitions. For instance, the main introductory
statement that appears on her website blog says, “I hate the fluids that
come out of my body every twenty six days” (Boreales). This contro-
versial statement clearly shows her political and aesthetic position. It
could seem a simple and personal statement that gives more presence
to her website and makes it more interesting. However, if her work
is carefully read, one will understand these ideas as central nodes in
the network she constructs. Arroyo seems to hate not necessarily the
fluids as a concrete element but the metaphors, the representations,
and the implications currently and historically associated with these
fluids in the definition of female bodies.
For instance, in “Matronas,” the third short story of las Negras,
Ndizi the narrator and protagonist explains menstruation as a sacred
state that is violated by the oppressors:
I always pay attention to the face of those who penetrate a woman’s

body without her permission, Father Petro. This was how, one after-
noon after being raped by the watchmen of the other jail, I found his
face full of ecstasy. He did not even respect the fact that Ochun’s blood
was rolling down my thighs, the lunar days of my thighs. (85)10
In this quote, Ndizi addresses imposition as a constant issue that

affects colonial subjects. She is concerned with the sexual act in itself
but, she furthermore questions a nuisance that is even more pervasive
and of longer impact: the imposition of time. Being raped as enslaved
woman is an atrocity, but being raped when bleeding becomes an
image that represents the imposition of time and the annihilation of
women’s voice and body. According to Judy Grahn, “humans have
a fundamental and unique tool of external-internal measurement in
the synchronization of the menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle” (7).
Unfortunately, such a tool has been classified as filthy by a patriarchal
order where woman occupies a secondary position in relation to the
rest of the metaphors created to coordinate and track time as a uni-
versal value.
Moreover, Arroyo devotes part of her work to thinking about the
relationship of body and technology. Examples of this are the varied
photographs and artistic works she posts and analyzes in her website—
like the photographic series by Emma Arvida Baystrom “There will
be blood,” or the hyper realistic work by Ron Mueck entitled “Big
Man”—as well as the images she constructs through her poetics.
For example, in her novel Caparazones, Vanessa, the main character,
becomes mother to a newborn child who was conceived through the
union of Vanessa’s lesbian partner Aleixa’s ovule and the sperm of
one of their friends—whose identity is not revealed and is of little
importance for the novel. Vanessa’s responsibility would be to carry

their baby, becoming mother and, in the novel’s perspective, becom-
ing an entity that overcomes any kind of tag or stereotype. This cor-
poreal goal in the novel—woman’s independence even from the very
conception of woman—is only possible thanks to the intervention of
technology that turns human body and biological life into exchange-
able goods within a capitalistic society. Body technologies intervene
and take part in the creation of life between two bodies (feminine
ones) that are not supposed to do so. However, Arroyo risks the use of
such a metaphor in order to advance a more interesting and counter-
hegemonic proposal, one that tries to cast doubt over our understand-
ing of temporality as a way to deconstruct impositions. After losing
Aleixa in violent and uncertain circumstances, Vanessa affirms:
Time does not bother me. I feel fine with it. I feel quite comfort-
able with it. Time made Alexia’s disappearance an opportunity for me
to reappear. Time was what I needed to convince myself that celes-
tial bodies rotate, mutate, but neither get created nor destroyed like
an object’s mass. Finally, I decided that the place of eternal dwelling
would be in this other universe. . . . Time is not a straight line that trav-
els in parallel planes. It is a vast curve that moves in zigzags giving
shape to devious spirals. (155)
Such a statement would be a perfect closing not only for her novel
but also defines her work as one that defies static discourses as those
imposed by history, literature, and culture in a context of male tradi-
tions. Arroyo does not look for a unified Latin American identity but
on the contrary she tries to defy the metanarrative of identity from
the microscales and microtemporalities of ever-changing differences.
This is precisely one of the links that connects Yolanda Arroyo to
Diego Trelles Paz: temporality. Both of them participated in one of
the most recent anthologies of contemporary Latin American narra-
tive: The Future Is Not Ours. Without the anxiety of influences, the
text proposes a contemporary way to read Latin American literature.
Like Arroyo, Trelles decided to rely on digital technologies in order
to write, disseminate, and promote the creation of his work and par-
ticularly of this anthology. As anthologist and editor of this project,
Trelles shows that his concern is to respond to the question asked
by Ángel Rama two decades or more ago: “Who, among the Latin
American writers, will remain in history?” (quoted in Trelles 5). The
Peruvian writer and critic responds to the question without making
reference to the now-exhausted debate between cosmopolitism and
regionalism that dates from the beginning of the twentieth century

in Latin America.11 Instead, he goes beyond this point by specifically
focusing on a selection based on temporal frames and cultural coordi-
nates: the anthology promotes young writers that were born between
1970 and 1980. Therefore, in this anthology there is a notion that
marks both the production and the reception of the text as a set of
individual but connected narrative accounts: the concept of youth.
For Trelles there has been a grand narrative that he and his com-
panions are interested in breaking down. It has to do with believing
in youth as the generation responsible for the future. On the contrary,
Trelles thinks that such a slogan is merely a discursive strategy of the
tradition to declare and justify a devastating present full of inequality,
social injustice, human rights violations, and discrimination of those
who have historically been left out of the conversation by the actions
of a neoliberal and fundamentalist market (Trelles 7). In this case,
speaking about youth would be to refer to “hedonism and individual-
ism, the rejection of intellectual elitism for a more street-based and
colloquial realm of experience, the apolitical attitudes centered on the
present time . . . the dismissal of grand narratives and ideas preferring
instead spontaneity, improvisation and the experience of the everyday
life” (Henseler 10). In this case, if the future is not youth’s respon-
sibility because, from their perspective, there will not be a future.
The writers included in the anthology, with Trelles at the forefront,
decided to take the lead here and now, in the present. This entails
that these young writers—and some not so young, some with more
publications than others—start to speak, to claim their right to dis-
cuss issues that do not belong to them but that have been assigned
to them.
As a convener, Trelles rejects some traditional Latin American liter-
ary discussions—for example, cosmopolitanism versus regionalism—
in order to highlight others. For Trelles, Latin American literature
is submerged in an isolationism that has been around since the for-
mation of the region’s nations. This is the same argument that has
served as rationale for the publication of previous anthologies such
as McOndo (1996), Líneas aéreas (Air Lines,1999), and Se habla
español (Spanish Spoken, 2000), as well as for varied publications
and events like Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish-Language
Novelists (2010), the publication of anthologies for Colombia,
Guatemala, and El Salvador, the Hay Festival with its transnational
endeavors, which gave birth to “Bogotá 39 group” (2007). With
this argument as the main reason for convening recent writers,
Trelles reflects on the possibilities of this new generation to break

down such a barrier saying
one of the fundamental concerns of this generation made up of several

Internet users who rely on the use of electronic means and devices—
i.e. blogs, personal web pages, social networks, virtual communica-
tion, e-mail, open source channels, and so on—is to recover an active
exchange with the reader on a region submerged in an internal pub-
lishing house isolationism (for example, it is almost impossible for
either an Ecuadorian or an Uruguayan to obtain a print book by a
Paraguayan or a Guatemalan). (Trelles Paz 10)
Resorting to digital media as a way to fight isolationism and to make

their voices heard is the same strategy Arroyo employed to advance
her “electronic poetics of the margins.” In the case of The Future,
the main objective is to give continuity to a vision proposed in books
like Macedonio Fernández’s Museo de la novela de la Eterna (The
Museum of Eterna’s Novel, 1975), Joaquim Maria Machado de
Assis’s Memórias Póstumas de Bras cubas (The Postumous Memoirs of
Bras Cubas, 1881), Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, especially “Pierre
Menard, Autor del Quijote” (Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote),
Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), and more recently
Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration, 1980).
These authors either engaged in a constant game with the reader or
created manifestos that make evident aesthetic proposals that consider
readers as the center of literature. However, these now classic Latin
American writers were also limited by the traditional isolationism
described by Trelles, in addition to the natural boundaries of written
language—as their artistic medium—to invite readers to become an
active part of literary communication. In the case of The Future, the
task is not easier than before although now writers can count on new
technologies whose core values are freedom of communication and
interactivity. The solution, then, is to initiate concrete communica-
tion with the reader, one that paradoxically goes beyond Umberto
Eco’s ideal reader. The reader Trelles is looking for not only has the
“capacity to cooperate in order to reactualize” a given style (Eco The
Role 11), but is a real-virtual persona that, despite dwelling in a trans-
national, and multidimensional space (cyberspace) could be seen as
either Ecuadorian, Colombian, Guatemalan, or even Latin American
at large. For Trelles and the writers of The Future, style—as a semiotic
concept put forward by Eco in his textual-semiotic model—seems
to be not only a personal way of writing established by a particular
author, but also the outcome of multiple negotiations and connec-

tions between writers, readers, organizations, and critics, creating a
network of styles that falls under the limits and possibilities of what
Latin America represents.
Some of the most successful representations of Latin America
are what Rory O’Bryen has called marketing labels: for example,
Macondo, magical realism, McOndo, or the Crack (O’Bryen 160).
The writers who publish in The Future try to escape from these
labels and stereotypes imposed on regional authors. For them, Latin
America and its associated brands are a burden they are not willing to
shoulder. Trelles affirms:
We wish to be widely read but without having to carry the weight of

the wonderful Latin American literary tradition of the boom which is,
without a doubt, very formative. The authors of the Latin American
boom are our very dear monsters, those who taught us many lessons.
(Trelles 12)
In this regard, authors from The Future are not looking for a univer-
salized Latin American identity as their predecessors did, but instead
they are making representations that stress their “sense of hedonism
and individualism” (Henseler 67). They are more interested in the
identities of daily life: sometimes marginal ones, sometimes made up
of several cultural links that turn them into hybrid identities that are
hard to classify by traditional cultural standards. The representations
of these multiple, individual, and ephemeral identities are at stake in
the configuration of this short-story anthology that tries to differen-
tiate itself from a tradition of anthologies that, in Latin America, have
carried the banner of the future as the time for salvation, innovation,
and change.12
Despite the radical position regarding the burdens of identity and
literary tradition, Trelles acknowledges the influences as well as the
varied canonical literary styles that work as the foundation for the
anthology. Since the contributors intend to represent marginal and
regular lives, they are not concerned with constructing a “total novel,”
one of the traditional practices of the Boom as well as of the Crack
generation. Instead, they are trying to narrate simple yet complex
stories that describe common experiences that could be real, though
they sometimes seem to be fictional. As the most noted influences,
they list authors such as Augusto Monterroso, Jorge Ibargüengoitia,
Manuel Puig, Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Bolaño, Clarice Lispector, and
Damiela Eltit, whose proposals try to cover a Latin American reality
that has been overshadowed by the endless impact of the Boom aes-
thetic. In any case, Trelles points out global historical events such as
the youth revolutions of May 1968, the continuous dictatorial gov-
ernments in Latin America, the advent of the perestroika as well as
the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, and Latin American events such the
slaughter of women workers in Ciudad Juarez as points that influence
their written practices and the way they face writing as a political act
(Trelles 12). In this anthology he is proposing to blur the boundaries
of time, making diverse temporalities collide in the present, which is
the only certain time. Every story in the anthology becomes an actu-
alization of many temporalities in the eternal present of the reader;
reading that becomes an ever-changing activity—a concept based on
Borges’s legacy—that manages to confront political issues and social
circumstances from the parallel world of fiction. This is precisely what
gives them the possibility of taking advantage of their natural means
and digital connections whether as digital natives or digital immi-
grants (Prensky 1).
The form and theme of literature has begun to open itself to the
potential richness of the new media (Paz-Soldán and Castillo 6).13
Trelles thinks of the Internet and contemporary digital tools as the
best means to breakdown not only a sense of isolationism but also
temporal impositions. The Future was first published in Piedepágina,
a Colombian literary magazine that appeared in December 2004.
Despite the twelve print issues, the magazine showed its commit-
ment to fostering the use of digital technologies and the Internet as
a way to broaden the scope of literary practices as well as to bridge
the so-called gaps between regional writers and readers. The edito-
rial text for the 2007 issue clearly says:
This issue of piedepágina has only been possible thanks to the Internet:
not just because this tool allowed us to quickly contact different authors
and critics (we have to thank all of them for their quick and generous
collaboration with this project) but also because the Internet opened
the door to map the different ways writing and reading are seen in the
region since most of the collaborators of this number (critics and writ-
ers) have personal web pages and blogs. (“Editorial”)
One year later, the magazine would lend its website to two related
Internet-based projects: the commemoration of Bogotá 39, the selec-
tion of thirty-nine writers under the age of thirty-nine—another
link between Trelles and Arroyo—convened by Hay Festival and
UNESCO; the other is the Trelles’s project, in which Arroyo will
have a spot among the sixty-three invited writers. When users look at
the Piedepágina website it seems as if time had stopped in 2008. The

hardcover for the project, along with the list of both writers and short
stories, became the central point of the site and a constant image that
has been there for more than four years now. The idea of time behind
Trelles’s project becomes even more concrete with the aid of this Web
tool that merges together temporalities with the constant present of
the reader. This could be seen as already happening with traditional
technology like print books, however the Internet gives these authors
and this anthology in particular the ability to do constant hypertex-
tual connections, though in a static manner.14 These links allow read-
ers to follow the path they want without any other restriction than
coming back to the main page where the index of authors and texts
is located. Readers will not have the possibility of encountering new
stories when clicking on a link. Nevertheless, the configuration of
new meanings is always possible as in the traditional way of reading.
Digital technology allows Trelles to establish a map of writers and
short stories that becomes constantly updated through a couple of
clicks. This map is made up of several localities—for example, Santa
Cruz de la Sierra, La Paz, Santiago, or Bogotá, as well as hybrid
locations such as Lima/New York, and Carolina, Puerto Rico/New
York—that give shape to a network of authors whose main interest is
the appropriation of the present. It may be one of the most important
ways to bridge the gaps of solitude that have surrounded the practice
of creative writing in the region.
The Future features both novel and consecrated authors such as
Santiago Roncagliolo, Jeremías Gamboa, Carlos Wynter Melo, Wendy
Guerra, Ena Lucía Portela, Diego Trelles Paz, Maurice Echavarría,
and others. However, the idea behind both the project as a whole
and the stories individually has to do with the consolidation of young
voices that, despite Trelles’s perception, are carrying the weight of
being read as Latin American writers, and as subjects whose proposals
are seen in direct relation to the endless and ever-present tradition.
They express themselves through traditional or fragmented stories,
but stories that try to see literature as a global-local eye that witnesses
the complexities of the multiple realities, and levels that give shape to
our contemporary world. Whether they adopt a political or an apo-
litical position, literature, short stories, and the conjunction of the
above with more advanced communicative technologies allow them
to speak of ideas and thoughts that were previously covered by a layer
of narrative and discursive correctness.
Yolanda Arroyo and Daniel Trelles Paz are just two instances of the
productive relationship between technology and literature. Although
the effects of this relationship are not yet completely documented,

I foresee productive present times (since the future is here and now).
Although blogs have started to disappear—at least the way in which
some authors see them—what really matters is that new forms of
using blogs as well as alternative ways of reading them and creating
literature are blossoming. Our symbolic world constantly challenges
us to see alternative modes of understanding it, in order to create and
to represent it. We are in the path of constant discoveries and redis-
coveries, and literature is not far from there. The future is here, in the
present time in connection with past and future discursive traditions,
ready to create alternatives to live in. Welcome to the future, it is our
time to invent it.
Notes
1. In Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner 1492–2019,
Serge Gruzinski argues that colonial America was a laboratory where
a clash between images and imaginations took place. Additionally,
this encounter produces a culture of the image projected to the
future and represented by Blade Runner as well as by the contempo-
rary electronic image. Though Gruzinski mainly focuses his study
on Mexico, he proposes this dynamic would work throughout Latin
America.
2. Fuguet announces the end of his blog (“Apuntes Autistas”; http://
www.albertofuguet.cl), but he states he may be around in cyberspace
for a while. His current website is called “Cinepata,” http://www
.cinepata.com.
3. Web 2.0 is a concept coined at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. As opposed to the former World Wide Web (Web 1.0),
the 2.0 version is based on collaboration, participation, and user-
friendly interfaces. These characteristics allow users to do more than
just retrieve information online, assigning them an active role in
communication.
4. This is a play on words to talk about the increasing importance of
digital technology in humanistic approaches as well as in the cre-
ation, dissemination, and reception of literature and literary pieces
around the world. The clear reference is the famous “linguistic turn”
in which the figures of Ludwing Wittgestein, Ferdinand Desausure,
Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida are fundamen-
tal. For further information see: Clark, Elizabeth. History, Theory,
Text (2004) or more classic texts such as Rorty, Richard (ed.). The
Linguistic Turn (1967).
5. These are two well-known multilateral and transnational organi-
zations that clearly mark the path for global cultural development.
This fact is quite important because it shows the way contemporary
literature is promoted, disseminated, and possibly read. Goethe’s

dream of a “world literature” seems to be behind these initiatives
and, sometimes, exceeding the scope by going beyond the world
Goethe imagined in the seventeenth century.
6. Arroyo gives voice to works by contemporary writers—most of them
Puerto Rican and Latin American—as well as artists and creators to
whom she pays particular attention due to the themes or styles these
artists employ.
7. The resulting discussion, according to Juan Gelpí, “was not read as
a written text but as the truth. For those who read it in the three
decades after its publication, Insularismo became the logos, a kind of
foundational voice, a source from where Puerto Rican national iden-
tity emanates” (El clásico 56).
8. This concept refers to the process of miscegenation in the Caribbean
that gives birth to a particular mixed culture called mulata. In this
case, Insularismo is seen as an endeavor parallel to negrista poetry
by Palés Matos who employed racial stereotypes to subvert colonial
visions. For more on this, see Branche 162–211; Fernández “No
somos antillanos.”
9. Through her electronic network and her electronic-literary practices,
Arroyo establishes an intercultural communication that opens the
way for shining light into darkened portions of culture. As stated by
international organizations such as UNESCO in its Convention on
the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions,
interculturality has to do with the coexistence of diverse cultural tra-
ditions in given locations. Processes such as migration and the increas-
ing adoption of digital communication have generated an increasing
concern for the promotion of cultural creativity and interaction.
10. This and other translation of Spanish language texts are mine unless
otherwise noted in the bibliography.
11. Some literary critics talk about McOndo as a reactivation of a debate
where there is contention between Latin American representations,
which are concerned with searching for a local and original identity
and Latin American representations whose concern is to look at the
insertion of Latin American letters in a cosmopolitan and universal
vision. See Ángel Rama and his classic Novela en América Latina
1920–1980.
12. Some of the Latin American anthologies mentioned by Trelles are
Del cuento hispanoamericano (Hispanic American Short Story, 1964),
Onda y escritura: jóvenes de 20 a 33 (The Wave and Writing: Young
Authors between 20 and 30, 1971), Novisimos narradores (Very New
Writers, 1981), El muro y la intemperie: el nuevo cuento latinoameri-
cano (The Wall and the Storm: New Latin American Short Story,
1989), and Antología del cuento latinoamericano del siglo XXI: Las
horas y las hordas (Anthology of XXI Century Latin American Short
Story: The Hours and the Hordes, 1997).
13. These new media, according to some scholars (Henseller, 2012;

Jenkings, 2006), give receptors an active role within communicative
interaction. “Prosumer” becomes a core concept within a “participa-
tory culture” in which there is a constant intersection, mixing, and
remixing of old and new traditions. This is something already done by
literary authors—as mentioned above—but boosted by the interaction
between word, image, and sound as elements that characterize multi-
media platforms and transmedia processes. Latin American literature
in particular has not ignored these processes, making The Future is Not
Ours one of the attempts to combine and create from diverse media.
14. One example of hypertextual creation in a dynamic and self-adaptive
sense is the proposal by Juan B. Gutierrez, a Colombian writer and
mathematician. He developed a writing lab on the Internet called
Literatonica.net that allows for the creation of dynamic hypertexts.
This means authors create different paths for the reader to choose.
Readers, in turn, are able to create several stories that are always dif-
ferent based on the rules the author has created. One role of sig-
nificant importance within Gutierrez’s model is the computer as an
author’s ally that allows him to create multiple paths with few rules.
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Arroyo Pizarro, Yolanda. Los documentados. Segunda Edición. Carolina, PR:
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-nuestro-2/
Chapter 10
Of Hurricanes and Tempests:

Ena Lucía Portela’s Text as a
Nontourist Destination
I n To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society, Louis A. Pérez devotes his

last chapter to study the conditions that have increased the number
suicides in the Caribbean island after the revolution. The first section
of the text focuses on establishing the origin of a certain view of death
prevalent among Cubans before 1959 and which, with important
changes, is continued during the revolutionary period. For Pérez, the
nineteenth-century fight for Cuban independence “inscribed itself
deeply into the dominant configurations of nationality” (322), both
spontaneously—in legends, popular memory, songs—and as part of
the deliberate construction of a Cuban identity through the erec-
tion of monuments and statues, the renaming of cities, public spaces,
and streets: “In 1921, the Cuban congress required every municipal-
ity of the island to dedicate a statue, bust, plaque, or memorial to
Martí” (324). The national images and symbols such as a national
anthem that includes the line “to die for the fatherland is to live” or a
national bird “selected for its reputation for dying in captivity” (324)
were reinforced by the historical legacy of sacrifice children learned in
school. From very early on, the Cuban Revolution presented itself as
a continuation of the nineteenth-century armed struggle, thus appro-
priating and redirecting a view of sacrifice with which that population
was already familiar: “sacrifice was celebrated as a legacy of liberation,
but also as a duty consecrated by those who perished in the struggle
against Batista” (339). Just like what happened after the war of inde-
pendence, the revolutionary government changed the names of public
spaces around the island. The teaching of history in schools empha-
sized “sacrifice as a condition of being Cuban. Heroic comportment
218 J o s é E d ua r d o G o n z á l e z
of the past served as a model of conduct for all time, informed with
the moral debt owed to previous generations” (339). Since the early
days, especially during the Bay of Pigs invasion, the importance of
sacrifice in defining life in Cuba was clear for revolutionary leaders.
Cubans, they argued, were ready to die for their country rather than
live without their revolution and socialism. As Pérez explains, quot-
ing Che Guevara’s words, there was no life outside the revolution
(350). Thus, the revolution not only transformed Cuban society and
the expectations of conduct of its members, but also the meaning of
death. Cubans who were part of the revolution and worked to build
socialism in the island had no right to commit suicide, as their lives no
longer belonged to themselves, they belonged to the revolution:
The life of a dedicated revolutionary was to be held in sacred trust,

possessed of value that transcended individual interests, and could not
be ended in any fashion other than in function of a larger social pur-
pose. The deed of suicide implied moral deficiency. The decision to
die was to repudiate the obligation to others: suicide was an act, in
short, tantamount to disavowal of revolutionary morality. The matter
of suicide was rendered as a matter of consciousness, and revolution-
ary consciousness did not admit the possibility of suicide except in the
service of the revolution or as an act of mental disorder. (350)
The revolution’s official reaction to an unusual number of suicides

among prominent members of the government was to explain them
as the result of painful corporeal afflictions that clouded their con-
sciousness. Unbearable physical pain, cumulative infirmities resulting
from battle wounds or automobile accidents, deep despair because of
the loss of a companion, and so on (350–352): situations that even
though they did not justify revolutionary heroes’ taking their lives, at
least explained their fatal loss of self-control. There were still suicide
cases that not even the government was able to justify or explain so
they would not be interpreted as a critique of the revolution. Such
is the case of Haydée Santamaría, a heroine of the revolution and
founder of the famed Casa de las Américas, the cultural organiza-
tion charged with establishing contacts with international intellectu-
als sympathetic to the Cuban government. Santamaría’s suicide was
reported on July 28, 1980, but it is generally believed that she killed
herself on July 26, the date of the attack on the Moncada Barracks,
which marked the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.1 Fidel Castro
did not deliver a funeral oration trying to explain her actions; as far
as he was concerned, she had betrayed the revolution (To Die 352).
Among the general population suicide numbers decreased for a few
Of Hurricanes and T empests 219
years after 1959, but they began climbing again at the end of the
1960s. From 1959 to 1980 suicides almost doubled, and during the
“Special Period”—the name given to the period of economic crisis that
came as a consequence of the fall of the Soviet Union—suicide rates
reached their highest level. Searching for an explanation of suicide in
Cuba, Pérez emphasizes the psychological trauma undergone during
the first years of the new social system: “within the space of twenty-
four months, the value system of a generation passed into desuetude,
and worse: it fell into disrepute and disdain. What had previously
been valued and virtuous was vilified; time honored conventions of
daily life, from child-rearing to modalities of public communication
and language . . . were disavowed and denounced” (347). In addition
to the mental and emotional stress, which caused changes in lifestyle,
economic aspects such as “chronic scarcities, shortages, and ration-
ing” made daily life difficult (353). The situation, of course, reached
almost unbearable proportions during the Special Period—which is
when Ena Lucía Portela’s story, “Huracán,” takes place—as every day
most of the Cuban citizens’ time and energy were spent “in pursuit
of even the most minimum needs” (354). With tens of thousands
of men and women idle because of factory closings, any sense of a
better future for the youth disappeared. Not surprisingly, “suicide
ranked among the third leading cause of death among the youth [in
the 1990s], preceded by accidents and malignant tumors” (359). In
spite of the unique problems that no doubt afflict every individual
who decides to ends his life, it is difficult not to interpret suicide in
Cuba as an upshot of the general living conditions created by the
Cuban political system. In fact, Pérez’s chapter is filled with examples
of works of fiction by Cubans and Cuban Americans in which suicide
almost always acquires a political overtone, and is presented, directly
or indirectly, as an act of condemnation of the socialist revolution in
the Caribbean island.
I imagine that as Ena Lucía Portela’s work becomes better known,
her short story “Huracán” (Hurricane) will become part of the syllabus
in undergraduate Latin American studies courses as an example of the
social effects of the oppressive Cuban government at the beginning of
the twenty-first century. How could professors resist the temptation?
Here is a story about a young girl—Mercedes or Mercy, for short—
living in an old house in Havana’s Vedado sector with her younger
brother. Their mother has died, their father was a political prisoner
who has been freed but sent into exile in the United States and her
other brother has died under mysterious circumstances. The siblings
live off the generosity of a friend of their father’s who periodically
sends them remittances, as they are both unable to work because of

their family history. In order to leave the country, they have to wait
for a governmental permit that never arrives. Portela’s story revolves
around a decision Mercy took several years before, which is kept
“secret” throughout the story, though it becomes quite evident from
the beginning of the text: she wants to be killed by a hurricane. The
night hurricane Michelle hits Cuba in 2001, Mercy decides to drive
around in her old Ford pickup to meet her fate leaving her brother
asleep in their house, afraid he will try to stop her. However, she is
unsuccessful in her suicide attempt. Her car falls in a pothole and
a tree falls on her, hitting her head. She is discovered unconscious and
brought to a hospital from which she escapes. At the end of the story,
Mercy is waiting for the arrival of the next hurricane so she can try
to commit suicide again. In spite of all the components that facilitate
an allegorical or semiallegorical reading of the story in terms of the
political situation in Cuba—the violence of the hurricane, the suicide,
the constant government surveillance—I would argue that Portela’s
objective is to produce a post-political, or nonideological, Cuban fic-
tion; a text that cannot, nor should, be read like Alejo Carpentier’s
or Antonio Benítez Rojo’s highly symbolic short stories. It is, in that
sense, a text that challenges canonical political texts and challenges
traditional readings of literary symbols. How can one write a post-
political text with a story containing so many traditional components
of committed literature?
From the very beginning, the author acknowledges that the situ-
ation of her protagonist, many of the actions and descriptions in the
novel, and especially the suicide attempt can be read differently from
Mercy’s point of view; in other words, others might read a political
interpretation to situations the main character chooses not to give
any importance. The idea that “whatever the issue, there are always
other opinions” (99) is suggested a few times in the text, thus sig-
naling interpretation as the central issue, as the battlefield between
the political and the nonpolitical. The first line of the text already
expresses the main topics of the story: Mercy’s desire to find a posi-
tion untouched by politics and the struggle over the meaning of her
actions. “It’s my choice. It’s mine, only mine. I don’t plan to dis-
cuss it with anyone” (93). Most of the story will be spent portraying
the result of the first part of the above quotation, her decision, but
toward the end of the narration it becomes clear that the second part,
her refusal to discuss her intentions with anybody, makes it possible
that her decision remains truly hers. Mercy chooses not to discuss
her decision to commit suicide with anyone because she is tired of
being perceived, she says, as a madwoman. Her madness, however,

is not that of a Romantic type. She is not presented as a person mis-
understood by a socialist society that limits the freedom of its indi-
viduals, as this would imply that all she wants or needs is to live in a
different type of society. If society considers Mercy a madwoman it
is because she rejects both political alternatives available to her: she
neither supports the regime nor is against it. An important detail is
that Mercy is a writer, an “intellectual,” even if she tries to down-
play this aspect of her life: “All my works (ha, ha, my works!) can be
reduced to five or six stories, of which I’ve published only one, in a
Mexican magazine” (99). Her experience writing fiction leads her to
distrust the written word and she opts for not leaving a note for her
brother imagining that people will look for an explanation in those
lines. “People who make the decision I made,” explains the narrator,
“tend to leave notes before going through with it. They write some-
thing like, ‘Don’t blame anyone . . .’ or the opposite, ‘So-and-so is to
blame . . .’ or whatever” (99). The comments appear to be an allusion
to one of the most famous suicides in recent Cuban literary history,
that of novelist Reinaldo Arenas who killed himself in 1990, leaving
behind a note that was published in the New York Times, among other
outlets. Arenas had joined the Cuban Revolution as a youngster, but
because of his sexual preferences he was unjustly incarcerated. Being
unable to publish his work in Cuba, he still managed to smuggle his
manuscripts out of the country. He was finally able to leave the island
during the 1980 Mariel exodus. While residing in the United States
he contracted AIDS, and after the disease reached an advanced state,
he decided to commit suicide, not before writing a farewell letter:
“Persons near me are in no way responsible for my decision. There is
only one person I hold accountable: Fidel Castro. The sufferings of
exile, the pain of being banished from my country, the loneliness, and
the diseases contracted in exile would probably never have happened
if I had been able to enjoy freedom in my country” (317). The faulty
logic of the letter, which blames Castro for his illness, is not as impor-
tant for our purposes as is Arenas’s assignation of a specific meaning
to his self-immolation. No one who knew his life story would likely
have failed in linking his suicide with his difficult time in Cuba and
in exile, but Arenas wanted to be sure not leave his act open to inter-
pretation. The designation of a culprit for his death is followed by a
description of how to interpret and react to it: “I want to encourage
the Cuban people out of the country as well as on the island to con-
tinue fighting for freedom. I do not want to convey to you a message
of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope. Cuba will be free.
I already am” (317). If one takes Arenas’s letter as an example of a

typical suicide note against the revolution, then “Huracán” is its polar
opposite. Instead of seeing in suicide a gesture of inconformity with
the political situation, Portela’s narrative is primarily concerned with
showing the main character’s disinterest in political opposition. Her
description of her family downplays the effects of opposing a dictato-
rial regime.
My mother had already died (her heart, her heartache), and thanks
to the negotiations of I don’t know what international human rights
organization, my father was finally released from prison . . . directly to
the airport. Now he lives in Los Angeles. My older brother Nene was
shot through the neck. Why Nene, I don’t know. He had nothing to
do with anything. Not politics, not drugs, not his neighbor’s wife. He
was just a little clueless and absent-minded, just like our mother. He
liked to read a lot. Poetry, mostly. He loved W.H. Auden . . . I suppose
they killed him for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as they
say. Or maybe they thought he was someone else. (93–94; emphasis
added)
Mercy gives no specifics about which disgustos (heartache) caused her

mother to fall ill and die. The name of the human rights organiza-
tion is not relevant in her discourse, nor does she give the reader any
information about the events that landed her father in prison. Just
as there are no details about her father’s involvement in dissenting
movements, Mercy expresses no anger, no cry for justice, regarding
his imprisonment. She states facts, adding no adjective that could
show her siding with her father’s cause, nor her condemnation of
totalitarian rule. The description of her older brother’s assassination
is another example of Mercy’s noncommittal discourse. She refuses
to read in his death a direct attack on her family in spite of the sus-
picious details surrounding the event.2 Nene’s interest in reading a
poet who often focused on political issues, might be an indication of
his status as an intellectual preoccupied with denouncing injustice in
Cuba. However, whether Nene was murdered as a result of his politi-
cal position or as repercussion for his father’s actions, Mercy insists
on seeing his death as fortuitous. In part because of Nene’s suspi-
cious death, Mercy’s younger brother becomes nervous and begins to
believe that their house is under surveillance, an idea the main char-
acter considers absurd, thinking her brother is paranoid: “[Bebo] felt
that they were watching us, that they tapped our phone to listen to
private conversations, and that they prowled outside the house . . . In
other words, that they sought to annihilate us. I asked him who,
and he answered, them. Who else could it be? Them. The dogs. The
sons of bitches. The same ones as always” (97). Mercy’s desire not to
become another spokesperson for the opposition, her refusal to see
the Castro regime as an all-powerful surveillance state, and to submit
to conspiracy theory-thinking remains even after Bebo’s death, which
shows parallels with Nene’s. Although he is apparently another victim
of Hurricane Michelle, his body “was severely bruised, with multiple
fractures, one at the base of his skull. What happened exactly, I don’t
know. I don’t think I’ll ever ever know . . . And why speculate, why,
I ask myself, if he is not coming back anyway” (106). No doubt one
of Mercy’s defining characteristics is her obliviousness to the violence
of the totalitarian state, but it also becomes a representation of her
monadic relationship to society, keeping her mind as the only space
free of politics and not letting the government or the opposition dic-
tate her thinking.
Finding an unusual way to end one’s life was not uncommon dur-
ing the Special Period, but in Mercy’s case it also means she is not
using the most common method of self-destruction for women in
Cuba (burning).3 Can one still rule Mercy’s death as suicide instead
of an accident, thus attaching to her actions a designation she is fight-
ing hard to avoid? The main problem for Mercy is that she has no
control about the meaning of her own death. One can observe an
example of the misinterpretation of suicide with a political objective
in Boom writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s “Between History and
Nothingness.” In his text, Cabrera Infante calls suicide an ideology—
an ideology different from the one the revolution endorses but one
without which it is impossible to understand that political event
because it is “one of its integral, almost essential elements” (139). The
long essay, filled with derogatory adjectives to describe individuals who
are or were supporters of the Cuban Revolution, is mainly composed
of a series of stories of self-destruction, some more connected than
others to Cuban history. Many of the ideas in Cabrera Infante’s essay
foreshadowed and possibly influenced Pérez’s study—for example,
the impact of Martí’s death on Cuban consciousness, the revolution-
ary government’s reaction to suicide among leadership ranks—except
for the most daring one: Cabrera Infante’s expansion of the definition
of suicide. For the Cuban novelist not only considers suicide those
acts in which individuals deliberately cause their own death, but also
when there is an unconscious “death wish” involved, that is, when
individuals put themselves in situations in which the odds of surviv-
ing are almost nonexistent. Thus, the author explains that many mili-
tary experts consider the attack on the Moncada Barracks a suicidal
operation as the ratio “between attackers and attacked was one to ten
(134 rebels against more than a thousand garrisoned soldiers) and
the disproportion of armament was so unequal as to be ridiculous”
(145). Cabrera Infante calls the airplane accident that took the life
of Camilo Cienfuegos, one of the main leaders of the revolution-
ary forces, self-extermination. As Cabrera Infante tells the story, in
1959, after Cienfuegos’s plane was reported lost at sea, a search, in
which Castro himself participated, was called: “[Fidel Castro] ques-
tioned the flight controller who told him that he had given the green
light to the plane under protest. ‘Fidel,’ he said, ‘on the radar you
could clearly see a storm coming. I told the pilot and all he did was
look at Comandante.’ The Comandante was Camilo Cienfuegos, who
turned to the pilot and told him: ‘Palante y palante!’ which was then
a kind of password of the revolutionary vanguard: ‘Go!’ The flight
controller ended with a remark that was the verdict: ‘Flying in those
conditions was suicide’ ” (150). Not only does Cabrera Infante inter-
pret as “suicide” deaths that are traditionally considered acts of war
or accidents, but also in his essay the so-called Cuban propensity to
suicide extends to anyone who comes in contact with or is somehow
related to the socialist government of the island. Thus, Argentine Che
Guevara’s last guerrilla war, in a Bolivian valley, was a form of suicide:
“Guevara in Bolivia, as before in Cuba, had behaved like a suicide
and between a fatigued guerrilla and a political hero or a saint of
a new religion, he chose martyrology. Apocalypse later, immolation
now” (152–153). The daughter of socialist Chilean president Salvador
Allende, Beatriz, and his sister, Laura, who were both “converted
into suicides by Cuban contagion,” killed themselves in Havana
(157–158). Cabrera Infante ends his article arguing that suicide is
the ultimate ideology: “a rebel ideology—permanent rebellion by
perennial suicide” (167), though it is clear that even though it might
appear as if the author is studying suicide as an “independent” ideol-
ogy, or a concept of ideology that transcends political divisions—his
examples, Martí, Chibás, Guevara, Allende, all had different political
ideologies—Cabrera Infante is appropriating suicide as an example
of anticommunist ideology. The type of interpretative gesture pres-
ent in “Between History and Nothingness” is what Mercy seeks to
avoid, because for Cabrera Infante it does not matter whether these
suicidal individuals left a note explaining their reasons or not, it does
not even matter if their deaths were actual suicides. As the author
of the essay, as the person presenting his reading of Cuban history,
Cabrera Infante is imposing his view of the events: his examples are
classified as suicides, and most of them are somehow connected with
Castro’s desire for absolute power. Mercy’s refusal to interpret the

deaths of her brothers acquires then a new meaning as she—unlike
those who are quick to attribute malicious meanings to history—is
refusing to impose her authorial power over dead bodies that can no
longer “defend” themselves. When she refuses to pick up the “clues”
that might explain Nene’s and Bebo’s deaths as part of an elaborate,
secret scheme to destroy her family, she is also thinking of how she
wants the meaning of her own death to remain undecidable.
The struggle for avoiding meaning, for avoiding interpretation,
is not limited to her suicide. There is also the other component of
her plan: the hurricane. The significance of the hurricane cannot be
overstated as Mercy is not merely trying to make her suicide look like
any accident, but she is specifically focused on dying as a result of
this storm system causing devastation over the island. The hurricane
has been chosen over other possible alternatives, but it presents in
itself a challenge for Mercy’s plan of undecidability of meaning given
that this weather phenomenon has an extraordinarily long tradition
of being interpreted, of having been taken as symbol and given a
variety of meanings in Cuba and in the Caribbean area. Most sym-
bolic uses of the hurricane focus on the obvious main characteristic
of the storm: its violence with terrible consequences for anything on
its path. Mercy, however, will reject traditional associations of the
hurricane’s violence in gendered terms. Aware of traditional hurri-
cane’s naming conventions and their influence in both popular and
high cultural interpretations of a storm’s image, Mercy decides not to
bring gender as a relevant element of her relationship with the hurri-
cane. The hurricane Mercy has chosen is Michelle, which made land-
fall on Cuba in 2001, but it is clear from the narration that she could
have selected any other—and that she will select a different one in the
future—which in part explains Mercy’s indifference to the name or
the gender of the storm: “Michelle. Like the Beatles song. Michelle,
ma belle . . . A glamorous name for a monster” (94). A couple of para-
graphs later there is another allusion to the gender of the hurricane.
Realizing the problem of giving it a female name as the words com-
monly used in Spanish to refer to the phenomenon are masculine
(el huracán, el ciclón), Mercy comments: “Michelle had traveled with a
chilling slowness along the Caribbean coast of Central America, and
the journalists had followed [him] (or followed her, no?) with their
cameras and microphones” (95). Mercy’s lack of interest in the “gen-
der” of the hurricane goes hand in hand with her project of not attrib-
uting any anthropomorphic characteristics to the storm as this would
result in assigning a meaning to her dying in the “hands” of a male
or a female cyclone. Even if Mercy is simply trying to avoid any type

of classification for her act, she is breaking away from a discourse that
combines violence and natural disasters as way of portraying women’s
marginalized conditions. One of the best examples of that discourse
in Caribbean literature is Gisèle Pineau’s novel Macadam Dreams in
which the cyclone that attacked Guadalupe in 1928 becomes a repre-
sentation of the domestic and sexual violence inflicted on the char-
acters. As a child, Eliette Florentine and her mother experienced the
destruction caused by that hurricane. A destruction that was physical
in a double sense: not only was their house destroyed when the beam
supporting the structure came down, but also the beam apparently
fell on Eliette causing permanent injuries on her body, and causing
her to become sterile. The destruction was also psychological as her
mother goes insane as a result of the event. As the novel progresses,
however, it becomes clear that Eliette’s sterility—and her mother’s
insanity—was not the result of an accident but of her being raped by
her father the night the cyclone passed through the island. “Natural
and unnatural sexual-domestic forms of violence,” explains Chantal
Kalisa in her study of the novel, “coincide in one moment and become
inseparable and damaging. Pineau superimposes images of Caribbean
landscapes that have been threatened and destroyed repeatedly by his-
tory and frequent hurricanes over revelations of intimate violence”
(119). What is interesting is how Ena Lucía Portela displays a delib-
erate attempt to move away from a specific “feminist” discourse as
part of her protagonist’s narration. In Portela’s “Huracán” any pos-
sibility of utilizing natural disaster as a narrative strategy to represent
any injustice or violence experienced by the female narrator—or any
other character in the story—disappears with the apparently more
important project of avoiding a “fixed” meaning to natural violence.
Likewise, suggestion of violence associated with human agency is
quickly dissipated. In describing how her brother would try to ruin
her plans if he woke up, Mercy is quick to explain that “I don’t mean
to say that he was violent, that he abused me or something like that,
no” (96). And as noted before, she refuses to associate any type of
political violence to her brothers’ deaths.
Interpretations of a hurricane’s violence abound in Cuban liter-
ary history. Nineteenth-century Romantic poet José María Heredia
wrote one of the best known poems on the topic. Heredia begins his
text with a description of the storm—the “lord of winds”—and the
effect it has on the environment. He describes, for example, a bull
who upon seeing the storm moving toward him, gets ready to charge,
scratching the ground with his legs and blowing “fire” through his
nostrils, thus indirectly comparing both of them. Just like one can tell
that a bull is getting ready to attack because all the signs announce
the coming violent reaction, the same happens with the approach-
ing storm. Heredia is astonished at the hurricane’s power of destruc-
tion, saluting it and calling it a “sublime storm.” The poem concludes
with the poet’s admiration for the brute force of the storm bring-
ing him closer to God, as if the hurricane were a manifestation of
God’s power, a proof of His existence: “on you I raise myself / to the
Lord’s throne:/ in the clouds I hear / the echo of [the hurricane’s]
voice; I sense the earth / shivering as it hears him. Fervent tears /
descending down my pale cheeks, / and his high majesty tremu-
lously adore” (quoted in Coronado 187–188). Interpretations of the
poem vary, many of them reading Heredia’s nationalistic feelings in
his description.4 From the Cuban Revolution perspective, Heredia
exemplifies a prerevolutionary interpretation of the hurricane, which
is capable of admiring nature’s force, and combines the cyclone’s vio-
lence with the necessary devastation to build a new nation, but that
was not yet historically in a position to see the political changes that
could be enacted after the storm. Novelist Alejo Carpentier, on the
other hand, clearly connects hurricanes to revolutions. Living in exile
when Castro took power, Carpentier returned to the island to work
for the new government, though after 1966 he remained in Paris as
Cuban ambassador to France. In 1962 he published El siglo de las luces
(Explosion in a Cathedral), a novel about the effects of the French
Revolution’s ideas in the nineteenth-century Caribbean. Though he
started working on it a couple of years before 1959, the novel’s main
idea could easily be read as the revolution’s view of Cuba’s past: the
narration was about a Latin American revolution that had failed and
the reasons why it failed, but it also carried the message of revolution
as a recurring event because of humankind’s never ending desire for
a better society. In the first chapter, a cyclone conveys this message:
“At this time of the year all the inhabitants of [Havana] were expect-
ing the cyclone—designated thus, in the singular, because there was
never more than one which was really devastating, and if it veered in
its course and failed to arrive on this occasion, then it would come
next year . . . Those who lived on the island accepted the cyclone as a
dreadful meteorological reality, which ultimately none of them would
escape” (Carpentier 54). For Carpentier, not only has the annual
experience of the hurricane been normalized, making it part of the
Cuban character (Pérez, Winds 146), but it has also come to represent
the idea of periodic destruction as an integral part of human destiny
which always creates the possibility of rebuilding.5
Portela’s story must struggle against a literary and cultural history

in which the hurricane has been appropriated with political objec-
tives, its image laden with symbolical interpretations. In Carpentier’s
novel—as much a classic of Cuban literature as Heredia’s poetry—
one can observe a discourse that appropriates a natural disaster for
political purposes, not unlike the way revolutions change the names
of public spaces. Not surprisingly, Mercy is very well aware of the
political readings of the cyclone and of how difficult it is going to be
to avoid any imposition of meaning to her future death during a hur-
ricane. The first time Mercy hears about Michelle in a news report,
the TV shows images of the devastation that the storm has caused in
Central America, especially in poor areas of the region, whose inhab-
itants complained that “their governments . . . did not care about them
and they would not receive any aid to recover, and so on” (97). In
contrast, while resting in the hospital after her failed suicide attempt,
Mercy watches the newscast about the impact of Michelle in the cen-
ter of the island and the reporters show a poor village, one of those
towns so insignificant that it “doesn’t appear on the map.” She could
see in the eyes of the townsfolk the same suffering as their Central
American counterparts. However, when interviewed their reaction to
having experienced the storm is unexpected: “They felt really good!
They had survived the hurricane, yes! And they’d survive whatever
they had to for their country and for the revolution! And they would
fight against Yankee imperialism, yes! To the last drop of blood! And
may the immortal Commander in Chief live forever!” (105). Mercy
laughs at the completely illogical reaction of the hurricane victims,
surprised that people call her crazy. The contrast between the Central
Americans’ and the Cubans’ views of their government is not merely
intended as a critique of the Castro regime. Obviously, the country-
folk are lying about their current situation and hopes for the future
because of fear of governmental retaliation. However, if the passage
were a simple, direct critique of the revolution, it would be inconsis-
tent with the general structure of the story, which wishes to avoid
leaning to any pole of the binary, neither against nor in favor of the
regime. One must also read in the reaction of the townspeople a rep-
resentation of the struggle for interpretation. While Mercy has made
it clear that the violence of the hurricane cannot be easily equated
with the violence of the state, the socialist system or a patriarchal
society, she must also fight the government’s move to appropriate the
hurricane as a political symbol. If the victims of the storm are really
expressing the government’s point of view, then a new reading of
the hurricane emerges as representation of an exterior political force
attempting to overthrow the revolution. The violence of the hurri-

cane acquires warlike qualities and the desire to survive the storm
is equated with a defense of the achievements of the revolution.6 To
assume that in the battle over interpretation Mercy is entirely reject-
ing the comments victim’s express on TV as propaganda is entirely
wrong. As she has said earlier, “everyone always has an opinion” and
the fact that she thinks they are “crazy” does not annul the pos-
sibility that they are expressing their own opinion. As a matter of
fact, Mercy herself expressed nationalistic feelings moments before
Michelle entered the island, when she began to imagine that Havana
was going to be destroyed by the force of the winds: “If the eye of the
hurricane hit Havana, which already was in ruins, it would be the big-
gest catastrophe of the last fifty years. For a moment I felt something
like patriotism. I hated Michelle” (103).
Even if Portela strips her “hurricane” of all symbolic meaning, this
does not mean that she is not aware of the literary tradition within
which she is writing or that she is rejecting. The topic of an island and
a hurricane can only evoke another island and another hurricane, one
that in the European vocabulary of the seventeenth century was called
a tempest. The connection between Cuba and Shakespeare’s The
Tempest is a complex one, in which one must explore problems of
modern politics and interpretation.7 Shakespeare’s work tell the story
of Prospero, the Duke of Milan who has been banished by his brother
Antonio to an island where he lives with the company of his daughter
and two strange beings he has enslaved using his magical powers.
One of them is Ariel, a supernatural spirit who helps Prospero with
his plans, and the other one is Caliban, who works for Prospero but
also despises him. Prospero uses his powers to raise a tempest, which
forces his brother’s ship to come to the island and eventually he is able
to regain his former position as the duke. For contemporary readers
and critics, Shakespeare’s play remains a relevant text mainly because
it is now interpreted as a representation of the colonial experience in
America.8 Postcolonial readings of the play revolve around the figure
of Caliban. In the play, Caliban is portrayed as a monstrous figure
who once tried to rape Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, and who, dur-
ing the story, attempts to start a rebellion to overthrow his master.
Critics have studied the unequal relationship between Prospero and
Caliban. Prospero raised Caliban and taught him religion and lan-
guage, but in exchange he has taken possession of the island, which
would have belonged to Caliban if Prospero had not killed Caliban’s
mother. The literature on the topic and the number of interpretations
it has generated is vast and I will not attempt to summarize them,
except for a specific Cuban reading of Shakespeare’s text, which is

part of the literary tradition challenged by Portela’s story. I am, of
course, referring to Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán (Caliban,
1971). Retamar’s essay has enjoyed a surprisingly interesting life in
the US academia, where it has been quoted by poststructuralists such
as Spivak and other postcolonial studies experts as an example of
resistance to cultural imperialism.9 Written in 1971 by one of the
best-known intellectual supporters of the revolution in Cuba, and for
a long time director of Casa de las Américas, the context in which the
essay was published is often ignored or only briefly discussed by crit-
ics anxious to talk about its main topic. However, Retamar himself
would probably acknowledge that the essay would have never been
written if it had not been for the events that took place the year he
wrote his study. Retamar opens his essay with a discussion of how
reading Shakespeare’s play changed since the 1960s, focusing on
Prospero as symbol of the colonization process and exploiter of the
island’s resources in the play. The Cuban author gives a detailed
explanation of the origin of the name Caliban—anagram for caníbal
(“cannibal” in Spanish)—which refers to the Carib people, one of the
groups originally inhabiting the Caribbean islands and erroneously
believed to have practiced cannibalism. In an influential reading of
The Tempest, found in Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900),
Latin America was not initially equated with Caliban. For Rodó,
Ariel, the spirit in Shakespeare’s play, represents the path that the
youth in Latin America should follow: a focus on the spiritual life, on
acquiring culture, and a desire to cultivate free thought. Caliban, on
the other hand, Rodó associates with the United States and with a
style of life controlled by materialism and utilitarianism. In order to
defend themselves from the cultural influence of the United States
and its materialism, whose dominance in the hemisphere Rodó could
already foresee, the author explains that Latin American countries
must enrich their spiritual values learning classical studies. Rodó was
convinced that because of the influence of utilitarian thought and
specialization, individuals would receive an incomplete education.
For Rodó, the United States was not a model of democracy Latin
American countries should follow because governments can only
achieve real social equality when they give the people access to all
branches of knowledge. Retamar is sympathetic to Rodó’s antiimpe-
rialistic discourse but disagrees with his use of The Tempest: “Our
symbol then is not Ariel, as Rodó thought, but rather Caliban” (14).10
Retamar establishes thus two distinct fields of cultural action. One
side, Caliban’s side, includes José Martí and all the intellectuals who
defend Latin American culture against neocolonialism (“the continu-

ators of Martí are found in Mella and Vallejo, Fidel and Che, and in
the new culture of revolutionary Latin America” [27]) while the other
side, Prospero’s camp includes intellectuals who believe Latin
American culture to be inferior and have tried to “civilize” the region,
that is, to impose an Anglo-European culture on Latin America.
These bourgeois intellectuals who side with Prospero include con-
temporary writers such as Borges and Carlos Fuentes. As mentioned
above, the historical context in which Calibán was written is essential
to understand the logic of the text. Retamar’s classification is part of
a textual strategy to frame the discussion of his unacknowledged
main topic. The Cuban poet’s main objective is to explain the reac-
tion of a group of international and Latin American intellectuals who
broke ties with Cuba as a result of the Padilla affair. The origin of the
case involving Cuban poet Heberto Padilla was the 1968 national
poetry award that Padilla won in spite of some of his poems openly
criticizing life in the socialist country. The jury, composed of interna-
tional and local writers, considered his book of poetry Fuera del Juego
(Out of the Game) the best in the competition even if they disagreed
with the contents of some of the poems. From Padilla’s viewpoint he
was writing within the boundaries of the Cuban government’s cul-
tural policy, which supposedly allowed criticism as long as there was
no intention of overthrowing the revolution. The policy was derived
from Castro’s 1961 speech, “Words to the Intellectuals” in which the
Cuban leader famously stated: “within the revolution, everything;
against the revolution there are no rights” (Castro 221). Unbeknownst
to Padilla, a policy change would take place in the years that followed,
likely due to economic troubles, which forced Cuba to have stronger
ties with the Soviet Union. As an upshot of these changes, Padilla was
arrested in March 1971. A large group of Latin American and inter-
national intellectuals signed a letter expressing their concern about
the poet’s incarceration and the suppression of free speech in Cuba.
A few weeks later Padilla was forced to sign a self-accusation acknow
ledging his counterrevolutionary attitude and denouncing his own
poetry. An even larger group of intellectuals wrote a second letter
expressing their shame and anger, and urging the Cuban government
to avoid creating a repressive system as other socialist countries had
done.11 As a result of the Padilla affair, many intellectuals who had
initially supported the revolution broke ties with Cuba. For many, the
policy change culminated in the speech that Castro gave at the
Education and Culture Congress in May 1971. Written in June 1971,
Retamar’s essay was one of the countless reactions to these events
written at the time in newspapers all over Latin America. It was

included in an issue of Casa de las Américas review published on the
Padilla affair.12 In Calibán, Retamar complains about intellectuals
who broke with the revolution because of “a Cuban writer’s month in
jail” (30), thus belittling the suffering and torture that Padilla under-
went. While international intellectuals complained that Castro had
changed his policy toward art in a socialist system, Retamar compares
quotes from the 1961 and 1971 speeches, arguing that there is con-
sistency between them (42–43).13 Just as Castro is equated with
Caliban, “individuals who attribute the volcanic violence of Fidel’s
recent speeches to deformations—Caliban, let us not forget, is always
seen as deformed by the hostile eye—in our revolution” (40), must
logically be on the side of Prospero. As a matter of fact, any intellec-
tual, even if they consider themselves leftists, become Prospero’s
daughters and sons and daughters when they criticize socialist coun-
tries (40). From Retamar’s viewpoint it is clear that those who broke
with Cuba over the Padilla affair are—whether conscious of it or
not—against Caliban. The separation of intellectuals into two fields
is mainly aimed at the Boom writers, whose books’ success bears “an
ostensible relationship to the new perspectives the revolution has
afforded our America” (32). In Retamar’s essay the two fields of the
Boom writers are represented by Alejo Carpentier and Fuentes (or
Borges) as the two opposing poles. If Caliban and Prospero represent
the two opposing sides, who then is Ariel? Retamar’s text here is a bit
confusing because while he had proclaimed that Latin Americans
should identify themselves with Caliban and not Ariel, he now says
that Ariel is “the intellectual from the same island as Caliban” (39).
The Cuban writer appears to be making a distinction between Caliban
representing the Latin American people and Ariel the intellectual
who “can choose between serving Prospero . . . or allying himself with
Caliban in his struggle for true freedom” (39). Ariel, in short, is the
symbol of the intellectual who has not made a decision yet, the intel-
lectual who has yet to take sides, but who must choose either with his
words or actions. One of the most controversial and often quoted
lines from The Tempest occurs when Prospero reminds Caliban that
he taught him how to speak in an European language, to which
Caliban rebukes: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is,
I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ For learning me your
language!” (46). In order to choose, explains Fernández Retamar, the
intellectual/Ariel must “sever the nexus of dependence upon the met-
ropolitan culture from which it has learned, nonetheless, a language
as well as a conceptual and technical apparatus” (40).
Portela’s version of a tempest in a Caribbean island rejects the logic

of Retamar’s Calibán, one of the most canonical texts in contemporary
Cuban literature. The main character’s fight over meaning, her desire
not to be interpreted has more to do with cultural politics after 1971
than with postmodern techniques. Mercy’s rejection of the binary
against/for the revolution identifies her with Ariel, the intellectual,
as perceived by both Rodó and Retamar, an association underlined
in the text: in The Tempest, the witch Sycorax imprisons Ariel inside
a tree; Mercy is trapped in her car when a tree falls on it, making her
lose consciousness. However, Portela creates an Ariel who refuses to
choose sides and does not want her words or actions to be interpreted
as being in either Prospero’s or Caliban’s side. Facing Retamar’s black
and white view of the Boom canon, Portela’s story wishes to move
away from the ideological binary opposition of the previous genera-
tions, as if looking to express an ideology that the author believes
cannot be contained within the two options available to Mercy. In
Retamar’s use of The Tempest, Ariel must sever his “dependence upon
metropolitan culture” and employ the language he has learned to
swear like Caliban. At the end of Portela’s “Huracán,” when Mercy
wakes up in the hospital, the doctor tries to get some basic infor-
mation out of her: “If that fat man [the doctor] really thought I’d
talk about myself, he was wrong. I told him nothing, not even my
name . . . He tried to coax it out of me, growing increasingly more
nervous. He told me that anonymous patients weren’t allowed . . . He
even threatened to send me to a psychiatrist. I gave him nothing”
(105). Afraid of her words—and her explanation, or refusal to give an
explanation for what she was doing during the storm—being inter-
preted in limited political terms no matter what she says, Mercy opts
for remaining silent.14
Portela belongs to the generation of Cuban writers known as the
Novísimos, which has been described as abandoning the ideal of a
“committed” writer. However, for this author, this does not mean
leaving Cuba and embracing a capitalist system and way of life.15 In
a 2008 interview, Portela explained that she was not interested in
writing for “tourists” and there is certainly nothing that could be
classified as commercial in her complex fiction—even the topic of sex
is banished from “Huracán” because “according to men in this coun-
try,” Mercy explains, “addicted as they are to volume and weight,
I’m green eyes, long hair, and nothing else” (97).16 However, what
Portela means is that in Cuban literature the “system”—how it is por-
trayed, the author’s attitude toward it, and so on—has become the
equivalent of a tourist attraction. “Tourists” are readers approaching
her writings from a simplistic is-she-supporting-or-criticizing-the-

system point of view and they will be disappointed. Her texts are no
tropical islands for tourists.
Notes
1. Cabrera Infante explains that Santamaría’s suicide, according to
Granma, Cuba’s official newspaper, happened on July 28, but that
“some in the know in exile maintain that the suicide took place on 27
July, a private date for her mourning the death of her brother and her
boyfriend [who died in the attack on Moncada Barraks]. You won’t
have to cheat wager and win that Haydée Santamaría committed sui-
cide on the 26 July 1980” (159).
2. Mercy’s comment on Nene’s death is translated as “Why Nene,
I don’t know” (93). The original says “Sabrá Dios por qué” [Only
God knows the reason], an expression that indicates the narrator not
only thinks it is impossible to know the truth about what happened,
but also that she is not making an effort to find out.
3. “Cubans devised many ways to end their lives during [the Special
period]. Suicide was often conceived as a long-term process for short
term gains. The Special period coincided with the increase in reported
cases of AIDS . . . One reason given for suicide through AIDS was to
gain access to sanitariums, to receive better housing and improved
diets. Relocation to sanitariums also offered disaffected youth a place
of political refuge and protection from official harassment” (Pérez,
To Die 361)
4. Raúl Coronado suggests an interesting interpretation: “Heredia’s
narrator mourns the devastation of progress even while admiring its
ability to shape the future. The trope of progress, no matter how
awe inspiring, brought with it the disenchantment of the world. No
longer was it a world produced by God where one found everywhere
the trace of the divine” (188).
5. Coincidentally, besides his study of suicide in Cuba, Louis Pérez
has written a book on the other major component of Portela’s story,
hurricanes. Pérez’s Winds of Change is mostly about how hurricanes
shaped the history of Cuba in the nineteenth century. His conclu-
sions about the influence of hurricanes in the construction of Cuban
nationality are relevant for our study because it is the image that
Portela’s story rejects: “The recurring experience of common hard-
ships contributed to the memories by which local triumphs and trag-
edies provided an all-encompassing narrative of a shared past as a
source of binding affinities. But this was not only a matter of a com-
mon past, for it implied, too, a future in which all were inextricably
bound. Hurricanes would surely recur, once more the community
would be threatened; again, all members would be obliged to join
together for the common good” (145).
6. Contrast the townspeople’s reaction to the storm quoted above

to Castro’s use of the hurricane metaphor in a 1963 speech, after
Hurricane Flora had passed: “A Revolution is a force more powerful
than Nature . . . Hurricanes and all those things are trivial when com-
pared to what a Revolution is . . . A Revolution possesses forces supe-
rior to all existing natural phenomena and cataclysms. A Revolution
is a social cataclysm; it is also the people running over. A Revolution
intimidates everything, invades everything, and is capable of demol-
ishing everything that is put in its way and all the obstacles that are
put in its path” (quoted in Pérez, Winds 148). In both cases, the hur-
ricane is given a meaning in relation to the revolution and the Cuban
nation.
7. On other connections between Cuban literature and Shakespeare’s
The Tempest, see Eduardo González’s study.
8. See Vaughan and Vaughan for a history of the interpretations
of Caliban. Chapter 6 focuses on the “Third World” adoption of
Caliban as a sociopolitical symbol.
9. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (1985): 235–261.
Critic Ricardo Ortiz, explaining the reasons why he was wor-
ried about the “risks” that he was taking with his 1999 critique
of Retamar’s Caliban, comments: “Retamar’s essay has enjoyed
considerable esteem in the United States, especially on the part of
progressive Latino and Latina and other academics of color, as well
as by theorists of postcoloniality more generally; in fact, especially
since its publication in English in the late 1980s, it has spawned a
genealogy of critical and scholarly texts as rich and complex as the
one [Retamar’s text] itself fashions in its own pages” (36). Jameson’s
“Foreword” to the 1989 English translation of Retamar’s essay was
no doubt influential in its reception by the American academia.
Having published The Political Unconscious in 1981 and his well-
known essay on “late capitalism” in 1984, Jameson was already a
powerful figure in American literary criticism. In his “Foreword,”
he completely ignores the political and historical context of the
essay—explained by Retamar in “Caliban Revisited,” also included
in the collection—and declares that Retamar’s main themes are “the
problems of internationalism” and the “paradoxes and dilemmas of
otherness” (ix–x).
10. Retamar’s points to 1969 as the year in which Caribbean writers
adopted Caliban as a symbol of their culture. Aimé Césaire wrote his
play Une tempête and, Barbadian Edward Brathwaite wrote a poem
dedicated to Caliban and Retamar himself wrote an earlier essay on
the topic (13).
11. For documents regarding the Padilla affair, see Casal’s edited
collection.
12. See Casa de las Américas, issue no. 68, September–October 1971.
13. See, for example, Rama’s analysis of how the Cuban cultural policy
has changed, written around the same time Retamar was writing
Calibán.
14. Portela is not the only Cuban writer to have rebelled against Retamar’s
interpretation. In his study of Reinaldo Arenas, critic Morales-Díaz
claims that the Cuban novelist created a counterdiscourse in which
Castro is identified with Prospero and Arenas with Caliban: “Arenas’
reaction and continued tactics in his writing against the revolution-
ary government, and Castro’s ideology of mandatory support for the
Revolution, share characteristics with Césaire’s and Shakespeare’s
Caliban, who decides that he will no longer be controlled by Prospero,
that he will plot and plan to overthrow the master/dictator” (82).
15. On young writers who have left Cuba and live in exile, see Portela’s
interview with López (50–51). The interview also contains interest-
ing comments on the difficulties of becoming a writer in the socialist
island, especially for women. In his study of recent Cuban fiction,
Dettman has defined the most recent generation of Cuban writers
thus: “The Novísimos, who followed in the wake of this disillusion-
ment, are a generation of Cuban writers that began to publish short
stories in the early 90s. They distance themselves from disillusionment
as an attitude or mood in their writings and also break away from the
previous generation’s mostly realist narrative paradigm . . . These writ-
ers also avoid the themes that characterized Cuban fiction during
the previous two decades; in other words, they abandon the ideal of
the ‘committed’ writer, turning away from socially conscious themes,
and reduce the narrative scope from the representation of totalities
like the nation, the island, or the revolution, to that of individual
experience” (151–152).
16. In the Spanish newspaper El País, Portela is quoted as saying “we are
tired of literature that portrays the ‘system’; the topic has become a
common place, it has become sterile. For me literature is not a news
show. We are not writing for tourists; we write from a universal view-
point” (“Cubana”).
Bibliography
Arenas, Reinaldo. Before the Night Falls. New York: Viking, 1993.
Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. “Between History and Nothingness. Notes on
an Ideology of Suicide.” Mea Cuba. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.
138–167.
Casal, Lourdes, ed. El caso Padilla: literatura y revolución en Cuba. Miami:
Universal, 1971.
Castro, Fidel. Fidel Castro Reader. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2008.
Coronado, Raúl. “The Poetics of Disenchantment: José María Heredia and
the Tempests of Modernity.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century
Americanists, 1.1 (2013): 184–189.
Dettman, Jonathan C. “Writing After History: Essays on Post-Soviet Cuban

Literature.” PhD Diss, University of California-Davis, 2012.
Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Caliban and Other Essays. Minneapolis
University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
González, Eduardo. Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the
Time of Diaspora. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2006.
Jameson, Fredric. “Foreword.” Caliban and Other Essays. By Roberto
Fernández Retamar. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
xvii–xii.
Kalisa, Chantal. Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s
Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
López, Iraida H. and Ena Lucía Portela. “Ena Lucía Portela.” Hispamérica
38.112 (2009): 49–59.
Morales-Díaz, Enrique. Reinaldo Arenas, Caliban, and Postcolonial Discourse.
Amherst: Cambria Press, 2009.
Ortiz, Ricardo L. “Revolution’s Other Histories: The Sexual, Cultural, and
Critical Legacies of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Caliban.” Social Text
58 (1999): 33–58.
Portela. Ena Lucía. “Hurricane.” The Future Is Not Ours. Ed. Diego Trelles.
Rochester: Open Letter, 2012. 93–106.
Pérez, Louis A. To Die in Cuba. Suicide and Society. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Pérez, Louis A. Winds of Change. Hurricanes and the Transformation of
Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2001.
Rama, Angel. “Una nueva política cultural.” Cuadernos de Marcha. 49
(1971): 47–67.
“La cubana Ena Lucía Portela defiende una literatura ajena al régimen.”
El País January 26, 2000. Web. July 22, 2013. www.elpais.com
Vaughan, Aldent and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban.
A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. New York: Penguin, 1970.
Index
anxiety of influence, 42–3, 44, 192, consumerism. See consumption

204 consumption, 28–9, 33–4, 116–18,
Ariel, 229–33 120, 154–5, 160–3
authoritarian states cosmopolitanism, 109, 111, 123,
Argentina, 106, 107, 110–16 125, 127, 205
Chile, 28–9, 33 counterculture, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22,
24, 27, 35, 36, 87, 88, 96
blog, 8, 191, 192, 195, 210 Crack group, 55–79, 92–101, 148
Boom, the, 2–3, 5–7, 12, 42–5, international acclaim, 68
46–51, 64–5, 70–2, 92, 148, manifesto, 56–9, 71, 75, 92–4,
171, 187, 223, 232, 233 96, 98, 134–5
general description of, 2, 55, reception in Mexico, 66–9, 74
85–6, 95, 97, 105, 118 Cuban Revolution, 3, 9, 72, 78, 85,
imitation, 59, 61, 86, 169–70 217–36
influence, 3, 53, 58, 63, 64, 68, cultural imperialism, 7, 15, 20–1,
69, 76, 77, 99, 134, 147, 149, 24, 30
169–70, 178, 183, 207, 208 culture industry. See popular culture
rejection, 2, 7, 9, 26, 42, 94, 109, cyberspace, 8, 11, 127, 191–212
117, 169
Boom jr., 169, 175, 182, 183 death wish, 142–3, 223
deep novel (novela profunda), 58,
Caliban, 229–30, 232–3, 235, 236 75, 89, 93
canon, 3, 5, 9, 12, 43, 44, 51, 52, deterritorialization, 111, 112, 116,
53, 85, 86, 89, 92–3, 94, 128
100–1, 107, 119, 134, 174, dirty realism, 88–92, 100.
175, 183, 207, 233 See also MoHo
canonization, 1–2, 40–1, 69–70, drug trafficking, 137, 153–66
99, 108
Casa de las Américas, 72, 218, 230, epistolary genre, 155–6, 161
232 essay-novel, 65, 90–1, 97–8, 100–2
Che Guevara, 22, 23, 52, 218, 224
chronotope, 62, 93–7, 101–2 female body, 202–4
citizenship, 7, 11, 27, 138, 139, 141 fetishism, 33–5
240 Index
film, 4, 8, 18, 19, 20, 21, 27, 28, 30, literary market, 4–5, 44, 55, 62, 68,
45, 53, 61, 66, 94–5, 98–9, 100, 100, 110, 123, 170, 173, 175,
101, 102, 107, 109, 110, 111, 183, 185
112, 113, 118, 180, 191 publishing houses, 61, 62, 85, 137
globalization, 3–4, 29, 109, 111, macondismo, 76

117, 118–20, 124, 126, 127, magical realism, 4, 6, 57, 58, 60,
128, 159, 171, 172, 194 100, 105, 109–10, 117–18,
guilt, 141, 144, 163, 166 121, 134–5, 169, 174, 193
marketing strategy, 4, 52, 67, 69,
high-culture, 18, 20 72, 77, 207
hurricane, 225–35 McOndo, 3–6, 26–7, 60, 76,
110–12, 117–21, 126, 134–5,
identity 148, 169–70, 193–5, 211
Argentinian identity, 111 melancholia, 140, 144, 150
Caribbean identity, 197 melting-pot, 198
Cuban identity, 217 metafiction, 91, 95, 97, 99, 125
hybrid identity, 112, 118, 196–7, Modernismo, 1–2, 108
200, 207 MoHo, 87–92
identity of a literary group, 57, manifesto, 85, 87–8, 92, 101
62–4, 66, 78 mourning, 107, 109, 113, 127,
individual/personal identity, 26, 140, 150
119, 120, 207 music, 7, 8, 18–21, 27, 28, 30, 109,
intellectual identity, 16, 18, 49 110, 159
Latin American identity, 7, 15, classical, 19–20
25, 64, 111, 119, 194–5, electronic, 171
204, 207 jazz, 18–19, 20, 21
Mexican identity, 20–3, 71, 95, pop, 7, 28
102, 124 rock, 8, 18–19, 20, 21, 23, 27,
national identity, 15, 20–1, 23, 28, 30
25, 27, 30, 31, 36, 93, 119–20,
123, 126, 197, 199, 200 narco-narratives, 153, 154, 156
postmodern identity, 25, 171, 199 nation, 10–12, 28–30, 94–5, 97,
Puerto Rican identity, 197 112–13, 116–17, 118, 123,
See also identity confusion; identity 128, 172, 173
imposition; melting-pot neo-letrados, 158, 160, 165
identity confusion, 198–9 neoliberalism, 114–15, 159, 194
identity imposition, 200 non-places, 111
Internet. See cyberspace
Onda group/movement, 5, 7, 8,
language as homeland, 123, 128, 15–24, 36
172, 175, 185
letrado, 153, 158–9, 164, 166 Padilla affair, 231–2, 235
lettered city, 135, 153, 158, 164, poets
166, 192 aura, 48
light literature, 59 perception, 46–7, 50–3
Index 241
political commitment, 9–10, 73, 93, technological advances, 1–2, 71,

111, 119, 128, 233, 236 156, 191–212
polyphony, 90, 97 television, 15, 20, 21, 25, 26, 30,
popular (mass) culture, 3, 5, 6–7, 36, 76, 78, 115, 118, 127,
8, 11, 15–36, 78, 96, 109, 146, 177, 228, 229
110–11, 113–14, 116, 117, total novel, 61, 86, 93, 95, 99, 171,
118, 120, 159 207
posnacionalistas, 5–12 tradition, 41, 73–4, 79, 86, 93,
Post-Boom, 6, 59, 64, 86–7, 92, 108, 110, 133–4, 136, 173,
101, 105, 107, 135–6, 155–6, 198, 205, 229
169, 175, 182, 186 transnationalism, 109
postmodernism, 87, 101, 107, 121, trash literature. See dirty realism
128, 185 Twitter, 8, 191
post-nationalism, 10–12
United States
race, 202 perception of, 28–32, 34–5, 230
reader participation, 135, 148, US academia, 219, 230, 235
175–86, 206, 212
revolution, 23 violence, 122–3
La Violencia, 137, 147, 149
shopping mall, 115, 116, 118 as result of natural disaster, 225–9.
sicaresca (sicaresque), 137, 148, See also hurricane
154
Special Period (Cuba), 219 witness, 145–6, 150
suicide, 144–5, 217–25
surveillance state, 222–3 youth culture, 15–16, 19, 21, 27

Timothy R. Robbins, José Eduardo González (Eds.) - New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative - Post-National Literatures and The Canon - (2014)

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New Trends in Contemporary

Latin American Narrative

About the Series

Books in the Series:

All rights reserved.

Eduard Arriaga-Arango is professor of Hispanic Studies at the

Zoetrope: All Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, The White Review,

Posnacionalistas: Tradition and

Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González

I n the 1977 preface to the Ayacucho Collection’s edition of Rubén

and was almost immediately republished in Mexico, an unprecedented

American experience as a deterritorialized and global space has at

In the present collection, Janet Hendrickson, Emilse Hidalgo, and

of the Boom, translation and conformity to the stereotyped percep-

It is difficult for the state to make strategic interventions if the major-

García Canclini associates the Boom, and Post-Boom, literary

(Please Rewind, 1998), Fresán’s use of Mexican comics, lucha libre,

writers is the use of cyberspace as a communication and distribution

the main characteristics of this generation of writers is not so much

and place of origin on determining an artist’s worldview. We argue

a continuation of the national form now in crisis. And yet, whether

Nicholson, Brantley and Sophia A. McClennen. “The Generation of ’72:

From the Mexican Onda to McOndo:

S ince the introduction of radio in Latin America in the 1930s—and,

between an internal desire on the part of his protagonist, Gabriel

activities of the Circle is evident in his reaction to the first meeting.

some rock bought in a passing weakness” (54). Gabriel sees Laura’s

He is a writer, but also a party animal. Gabriel shows the begin-

seen as a foreign invasion, is a way of resisting the controlling power

to counteract the Muzak and reading Playboy, the essential metaphor

Huberto Haltter and Humberto Heggo are Mexicans; id est, citizens

Mexican identity is stuck in a realm of insignificance: it is neither

Cup Finals of 1970. This position of insignificant national identity

both Argentina and Chile see a transition from authoritarian dicta-

resources” (5). The postmodern experience that Sarlo describes is

so much a transition from national to individual, public to private

happened. As if, in a dream or something, someone pushed Record

This dissatisfied, yet apathetic reaction is juxtaposed with the histori-

think of Orlando and Disney World, of Miami, of McDonald’s and

Progress is conformity with the ultimate symbol of North American

Santiago had freeways and highways to roar down: I could get up

I’m still bored—bored, fed up. Even thinking is a monumental effort.

It is clear that Matías struggles with a sense of purpose in the novel,

He finds a sense of superiority through his knowledge of US mass

essentially giving up on his rebellion and returning to the familial

The “SI” won, with 67.6 percent of the vote. Ironcially, nobody in

Civic (and in Matías’s case, familial) tranquility is more important

allowing the dictatorship to run its own course. As José Leandro

[The protagonists] feel the dictatorship as a type of inconvenience, as a

3. Martine Renouprez describes Agustín’s own insistence on becom-

García Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures. Trans. Christopher Chiappari.

Bolaño and the Canon

R oberto Bolaño’s biography and literary career can be summarized

fiction. When asked in a 1999 interview, “What is your relationship

suppose, the hidden evidence of a struggle between precursors and

repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist

marooned on dead-end planets, in deserts where there are no read-

and Gloria is revealed to be the actual author of Donoso’s novel while

by Lopito’s sacrifice at the end of the novel. Mañungo, because he

folklore is an integral part of Donoso’s textual repertoire. Lopito is a

de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (Advice from One of Morrison’s

when he depended on the earnings from literary contests to make

The Crack and Contemporary