Logbooks for a New Latin American Nonfiction

The literary Latin American twentieth century abounds with “essaying” views and practices that seem tentative for readers used to the conventions of some canonical authors. But essaying is precisely the origin of the practice, and there are no conclusive characteristics, classifications, regional explanations, or stable models, and the heterogeneity of authors and practices is vast. That was evident in the authors, topics, and critics in Review 100 (June 2020) and Review 101 (December 2020), which did not include writers who came of age in the late nineties, like the exclusively male Crack group in Mexico and the mainly South American McOndo. Review 107 does not aim to recover or put those movements in perspective, reaffirm the canonicity of the classics included in Review 100, or discover authors who could have been in Review 101. The nonfiction selected here demonstrates that there are inescapable literary dialogs in today’s writing with past Western traditions (see Jazmina Barrera, Carmen Boullosa, Mariana Enríquez, Julián Herbert, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez), and the link is its profound Latin American character.

Since 2020, with the ostensible mitigation of the Coronavirus, the advent of ChatGPT, and other sources of knowledge dissemination, those dialogs have changed. Yet, the texts chosen transmit confidence in the style of nontraditional narratives, maintaining storytelling, proving that to think freely also means to change your mind (i.e., Alejandro Zambra), and revising their cultural zone’s prose conventions. Compare Douglas T. Day’s “Malcolm Lowry in the New World: Down and Out in Vancouver and Oaxaca” in Review 100, originally published in Review 38 (1985), with Herbert’s “Three Ideas for Returning to Under the Volcano” here. Day wrote the “novel” The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magón (1991); Herbert, also a rock vocalist, wrote the superb new historical novel La casa del dolor ajeno: Crónica de un pequeño genocidio en La Laguna (2017; The House of the Pain of Others: Chronicle of a Small Genocide, 2019), about the massacre of some three hundred Cantonese immigrants during the Mexican revolution. Day and Herbert overturn essayism by merging it with academic research, personal reflection, and reportage, in diverse ways “Mexicanizing” their subject. Novelists like Eduardo Lalo espouse a hybrid poetics, while Gabriela Alemán peruses the difficulties and solutions encountered in setting a story in a fairly unknown Paraguay for her novel Humo (2017). Both texts dovetail into analogous touchstone statements from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Los novelistas como críticos (2 vols., 1991), edited by Norma Klahn and me.

Most of those themes have little to do with personal identity or regional politics, academic saws that Mayra Santos-Febres and Horacio Castellanos Moya tweak here, expounding on other pressing issues. Our authors write from what they are, and if that positioning includes cultural diversity, difference, and impurity (see María Gainza’s perspectives on art), so much the better. Compare Ana María Barrenechea’s “Hopscotch and Its Logbook” in Review 30 (1981) with Leonardo Valencia’s “Three Notes in Free Fall about the Novel” here. A preview to Cuaderno de bitácora de Rayuela (1983), co-authored with her canonical compatriot Julio Cortázar, she studies narrativity exhaustively in the seminal Hopscotch and its author’s cosmopolitan perception of the genre; while Valencia’s and Vásquez’s reflections on the novel, ongoing in their nonfiction books and journalism, evince the new generations’ interest in the historical transformations of prose and how they use nonfiction to address their agency by writing about other novelists, their peers, the genre itself, or world masters. Their prose is attuned to a specific sense and sound, in fugues (see Patricio Pron) that do not favor either aspect because they are thinking about the larger consequence of their texts.

What can those essays or nonfiction be at this digital time? Since the writers featured have long careers ahead of them, one can suspect they want to preempt interpretative pronouncements about their development and inclinations. In a stricter sense, perhaps they do not want to be accommodating critics when their prose straddles the practice—more Borgesian than ever since the 1940s—of presenting narrative as an essay, and the essay as narrative. For all intents and purposes, the generically disobedient Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso—admired by Italo Calvino, Isaac Asimov, Enrique Vila-Matas, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Roberto Bolaño, his Mexican disciple Juan Villoro (see his Review 101 essay on another stylistic master of hybridity, “The Memory Quarry: On Sergio Pitol”), Valencia, and many in younger cohorts—is the principal influencer, a term for which he would have devised a witticism.

Monterroso persistently mused about what prose can or should be. As a Montaigne devotee, he did not settle on what it is. The generations introduced here are equally unconcerned about the downsides of traditions or experiments in metafiction, victimology or the posthuman akin to writers like Mario Bellatin or Cristina Rivera Garza (see how Ariana Harwicz avoids the implosion of such Anglophone cogitations), knowing that the world at large leverages the positive in gender or genre displacements. In “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Jorge Luis Borges,” from Movimiento perpetuo (1972; Perpetual Motion), Monterroso recalls discovering him in the 1940s by reading his prologue to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” Ascertaining that comprehending Borges “meant discovering and descending to new circles: Chesterton, Melville, Bloy, Swedenborg, Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf; it meant renewing old relationships: Cervantes, Quevedo, Hernández; finally, it meant returning to that illusory paradise of the ordinary: neighborhoods, films, detective novels,” he lists benefits and drawbacks because “finding Borges never occurs without consequences.”¹

In a typically essayistic performance in the posthumous Literatura y vida (2004), he addressed what the creative essay was to him. His “Cervantes ensayista” delineates it thus:

You know, an essay is a sort of brief text, very free, preferably in first person, about anything, on some custom or someone’s extravagance, written in an apparently serious tone but ideally enclosed in vague light humor and, if possible, ironically [ … ] without the slightest effort to affirm anything conclusive. And if what it expresses relays certain melancholy or determined skepticism about human destiny, just as well; and if a digression slips in here and there, so much the better; because the freedom to go from one theme to another without excuses or affectation, and even interrupting oneself and forgetting (or acting like you are) where you are going, can be what gives the essay a charm similar to the one that an intelligent conversation gives off (2004).

There are no conceptual teaching moments from Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, or Jean Starobinski in Monterroso’s concluding statement about the competing urges of the foundational Spanish master, foreshadowing our authors’ conviction: labels exclude and segregate. There is thus no particular semantic need to see in “nonfiction” a fashionable or performative tweaking of the essay, for it is a well-founded revision in tune with the changes that Lee Guttkind mapped when coining the category “creative nonfiction” around 1993, based on elusive combinations of feature-length magazine articles, memoir, personal essays, and narratives in literary journals, the original sources for many of the works here. Nonfiction is a world literature type (see the area introductions), with abundant practitioners like Emmanuel Carrère, established without excessive jargon or intellectual fuss. Merve Emre, who writes for scholarly and cultural journals, still refers to the essay; but in practice she, as well as some academics and the theoretical precursor Claire de Obaldia, revise components encompassed by the new term.²

Latin American nonfiction does no less, but its criticism lags behind (as Samanta Schweblin points out about fantastical fiction) when dismissing slogans among earlier thinkers. Migration is making borders porous in the Americas, even more so than the ones between the United States and Mexico. Likewise, cultural mobility in the countries represented makes them more honeycombed, and the advent of various AI systems complicates determining the progeny of a long essayistic tradition or their bailiwick. So as not to historicize endlessly, it is safe to assume that utopian traditions are exhausted owing to clichéd matters of content and form, and because of the practice by those who seek conventional models; although that cannot be said categorically about earlier avant-gardists (an unheralded aspect of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui), or about Octavio Paz, Mario Benedetti, and Vargas Llosa. Instead, our authors’ logbooks forge a new nonfictional path, feasibly heeding the great Mexican influencer Carlos Monsiváis’s caveat about the new generations’ “lost allusions”: his 2007 speech on how each new generation forgets references from preceding ones, which becomes a tendency to “retire” anything from the past that is not useful.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Will H. Corral

Will H. Corral (Ecuador; Ph.D. Columbia) has taught at UMass-Amherst, Stanford, and other universities. In 2014, he held the Cátedra Abierta Roberto Bolaño in Chile. He is the author or co-author of sixteen books, including Theory’s Empire (2005) with Daphne Patai and Peajes de la crítica latinoamericana (2023; Tolls of Latin American Criticism).

Notes

1 The original Movimiento perpetuo (1972) was his third book, published in English together with his first collection, Obras completas (y otros cuentos) (1959), as Complete Works and Other Stories (1995). My introduction to the latter lists the authors for whom Monterroso was an initial influencer (xvii). All translations are mine.

2 See, respectively, Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Irène Langlet, L’Abeille et la Balance. Penser l’essai (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), Brian Dillon, Essayism (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), and The Cambridge Companion to the Essay, eds. Kara Wittman and Evan Kindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), particularly Emre’s “The Personal Essay” (32-48) and Jason Childs’s “The Essay and the Novel” (199-214).