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In his essay “The Boom in Spanish-American Literature: A Personal History” (1972), the Chilean writer José Donoso recalls the hardships he endured through the isolation he faced during the early 1960s, in his hometown of Santiago, where publishing houses dedicated to literature were scarce and news from other Latin American capitals took years to arrive. Donoso remembers it being 1961 when he read the first novel by a Latin American author of his generation that “brusquely tore me away from the esthetic to which, despite Buenos Aires, I was still attached”: that book was Where the Air Is Clear and its author, Carlos Fuentes, was, according to Donoso, “the first active and conscious agent of the internationalization of the Spanish American novel” of that decade. This process of internationalization, which culminated with the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, is what’s come to be known as the “Boom.”
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. But what the “Boom” meant—how it came to be, whether it was just a marketing phenomenon, to what extent it has influenced subsequent generations—continues to arouse debate. At the end of the essay, Donoso attempts, in a certain, playful sense, to codify the “Boom”: at the top, he places the four “kernels” who make up what he calls the “gratin,” “the very core” of the movement—Fuentes, García Márquez, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa—before immediately going on to describe the “proto-Boom,” the “junior Boom,” the “sub-Boom,” and even the “petit Boom” of the Argentine novel. Beyond the provocative gamesmanship implicit in these classifications, what Donoso reveals is the variety, breadth, and strength of Latin American literary production during the twentieth century.
I would dare to say it was the “golden age” of Latin American literature written in Spanish. It started with poetry, with César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and José Lezama Lima as standard-bearers of an intense renewal of language, though soon enough it would find a counterpart in the narratives of Borges, Asturias, Carpentier, Onetti, Sábato, and Rulfo, among many others. The “Boom” was simply the crest of an immense wave made up of three generations of writers who were born starting in the final decade of the nineteenth century and produced their works throughout the twentieth: a period during which Latin American literature not only matured but also became an imperative section of the orchestra that is world literature.
Many of these poets and novelists shared a common purpose: to write the “great work” that would represent Latin American reality. Behind that purpose, the desire for affirmation was all-encompassing, plethoric, expansive, protean. In the case of fiction, it was about writing “the total novel”: Asturias on Indigenous Guatemala, Carpentier and the marvelous Caribbean, Fuentes on post-revolutionary Mexico. There was no need for this “total novel” to be constrained by national borders; it could invoke allegory, as in the case of García Márquez, or appeal to a single city, like Leopoldo Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres or Cabrera Infante’s novels of Havana.
It was a literary movement similar in terms of enormity to the one that shook England in the early sixteenth century with Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift at the helm, or that which erupted in Tsarist Russia in the mid-nineteenth century with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy leading the way. And, dare I say, it was richer and more extensive, because within the same language, diverse experiences as well as national peculiarities and genres were incorporated to such a degree that perhaps the most important fiction writer of the twentieth century, Jorge Luis Borges, refrained from writing novels. His preference for the short story was not a solitary one; rather, it was part of a current of other masters of the form across the continent, from the Uruguayans Horacio Quiroga and Felisberto Hernández, to the Cuban Lino Novás Calvo, the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro, and Cortázar himself. A literary production so filled with peculiarities that the single most significant Mexican novel, both domestically and internationally, Pedro Páramo, was written by someone, Juan Rulfo, who—after that one single book—retired not only from the genre but from writing in general.
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A literary explosion like the one that shook Latin America in the twentieth century doesn’t arise out of nowhere. To the contrary, it is the result of a process of accumulation, of searches, achievements, and failures. And it conquers the international market on its own strength and greatness, not by publicity stunts or by submitting to fashions or trends imposed by that very market. It is, therefore, a point of arrival, a culmination grounded in a profound literary, philosophical, and political renewal of the continent.
If the renewal of poetic language led by Vallejo and Neruda meant leaving behind the hangover produced by Rubén Darío's modernism, the leap forward in narrative meant leaving behind all the regionalist and folkloric currents that had come to mark Latin American literature up to that point.
This literary renewal was preceded by, or perhaps corresponded with, a new idea of Latin America in the philosophical sense, one in which the emphasis was placed on miscegenation, on recognizing ourselves as a new race (“the bronze race,” as José Vasconcelos said), and on the differentiation from North or Anglo-Saxon America. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Enrique Rodó, Alfonso Reyes, and José Carlos Mariátegui, among others, laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking in the region, for a reassessment of Latin American values vis-à-vis Western culture in general. Flowing from different philosophical currents, from idealism to Marxist materialism, they all agreed on one faith: Latin America was the continent of the future.
There was a political notion that corresponded to this Latin American thought: for this faith in the future to become a reality, a social and political change—an instrument of emancipation—would be needed. The majority of the most important Latin American poets and narrators of this “golden age” either flirted with or fully assumed the communist utopia: many of them were either militants or at least fellow travelers. And when the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro triumphed in 1959, they saw in that even the embodiment of a possible utopia. There were, of course, great exceptions—Borges, Paz, Onetti, and Rulfo were among those who remained on the sidelines—and it wasn’t long before a number of other writers entered into a process of disenchantment and fissure.
What is undeniable is that the push behind literary production was driven by a continent in search of its own identity, a thrust based on the confidence that the time for Latin America was at hand and that the renewal of Latin American thought would produce its own forms of social and political organization which would put an end to social injustice. But nothing quite like that ever materialized, and the great legacy of Latin America in the twentieth century remains its literature.
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This is the law of the pendulum: after the great wave comes the ebb, the riptide; after concentration, dispersion; after the all-embracing will to create, fragmentation; after the epic grandiloquence, the intimate, minimal story. The generation of writers born in the forties, who came after the “golden age” of literature with its “Boom,” belong to this ebbing movement, reacting to their overwhelming heritage and seeking new forms of expression. They no longer have to reaffirm themselves before the court of world literature with a work that encompasses the totality of what it means to be Latin American. Latin American literature is standing there, present and at attention, occupying a privileged position in the orchestra of world literature. Vivacious in its maturity. With no need to prove anything nor prove itself. There were even a number of very new groups of writers renouncing the historical and geographical spaces of Latin America, turning to Europe and other continents on which they would place their fictions.
There are many examples of this swinging pendulum. The great period portrait that was Hopscotch now corresponds to the reduced and fragmented worlds of the innumerable short novels of César Aira. Miguel Ángel Asturias’s bombastic ambition of encompassing the Mayan world is followed by Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s minimalist prose. When faced with the creation of a spherical, hermetic universe such as García Márquez's Macondo, the reaction of authors such as Fernando Vallejo is to write provocative and corrosive novellas in which “Colombianness” is mocked and impugned. Instead of the monumentality of novels like Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, short experimental fiction such as that of Mario Bellatin is now being produced.
Of course, this arrangement is a schematic one and there are always authors who break those schemes. Such is the case with the Chilean Roberto Bolaño who, despite statements he has made against the “Boom,” wrote a work that, owing to his ambition to produce a great work that would totalize all of Latin America, is closer to writers like Cortázar than his own contemporaries. It seems to me that Bolaño’s secret dialogue—which he used to privately gauge himself—was with Cortázar and Donoso, even as he only accepted Borges as his master. From Cortázar he took over the mantle in terms of formal juggling acts and cosmopolitanism, while Donoso was the “secret rival” who must be overcome, owing to their shared Chilean origins. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that Bolaño has replicated Donoso’s formula: two great centerpieces (The Savage Detectives and 2666 versus The Obscene Bird of Night and A House in the Country) surrounded by a larger quantity of short fiction of varying subject matter. It is a hypothesis. And like Bolaño, there were several writers who emerged after the “golden age” who broke the mold, such as Uruguay’s Mario Levrero (1940-2004) or Mexico’s Daniel Sada (1953-2011).
At the onset of the twenty-first century, Latin American literature is comprised of a mosaic of works that is more fragmented and difficult to classify: works that express another historical moment for the societies in the region and are characterized, on the one hand, by a certain democratic stability in most countries and, on the other, by uncertainty, criminal violence, rampant corruption, and drug trafficking. Unlike their predecessors, many authors from these most recent generations seem more interested in positioning themselves for the national and international markets—for the thematic demands of those markets—than in social and political movements. These, then, are other times.
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Horacio Castellanos Moya
Horacio Castellanos Moya (Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 1957) worked for two decades as a news editor in Mexico and Central America, and has published more than a dozen novels, five short story collections, and four nonfiction books. His novels include Insensatez, (2004; Senselessness, 2008), Tirana memoria (2008; Tyrant memory, 2011), and El sueño del retorno (2013; The Dream of My Return, 2015). He teaches in the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Iowa. This text originally appeared in Spanish in Roque Dalton: Correspondencia clandestina y otros ensayos (2021).