The Columbia History of the American Novel

from Trinidad, fiction is a national enterprise: 'Caribbean fiction can help to strengthen our self-image, our resistance to foreign domination, our sense of the oneness of the Caribbean and our willingness to put our energies into the building of the Caribbean nation.' To Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, writing fiction is an attempt 'to draw together everything I am and have been, both Caliban and Ariel and a liberated synthesized version of each.' In the last decade she has published four novels: Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980), Abeng (1984), The Land of Look Behind (1985), and No Telephone to Heaven (1987).

Until the emergence of modern Caribbean literature, literate traditions of the English-speaking Caribbean were largely dictated by the interests of European imperialism. The achievement of the Caribbean writer has been to dislodge the tyrannical subordination of indigenous cultural expression without surrendering rights of access to cultural traditions that are rooted in Europe as well as in Africa, Asia, and an Amerindian past. Right now there is a dominant sense of new beginnings among writers who are laying the groundwork for a cultural community that eschews linguistic and national boundaries -605- and celebrates the unity and diversity of Caribbean life. A critical view of the novel of the Caribbean that cuts across the barriers of language, politics, space, and time to comparison with Dutch-, French-, and Spanish-speaking counterparts and contemporaries is a logical extension of the multinational contours of the West Indian novel discussed here. Issues of filiation and affiliation are complex in the multiracial, polyglot societies of the Caribbean, where cultural identity is fluid and tradition has value as preamble rather than as main text. The novel of the Caribbean is enlarged rather than diminished by complementary discursive rubrics that provide a basis for comparison with other New World literatures and with African and Indian diasporan perspectives.

Sandra Pouchet Paquet

-606-

Latin American Fiction

A number of years ago the Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman published a slim volume entitled The Invention of America. Columbus did not discover America in 1492, he argued; rather, 'America,' and the idea that it was 'discovered,' are much later inventions, projected interweavings of desire and imagination that find their typical form in the 'chronicles' and histories of writer/explorers like Bernal Díaz de Castillo (Verdadera historia de los sucesos de la conquista de la nueva España), Alvar Núñez Cabeza de la Vaca (Naufragios), Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Historia de las Indias), or Hernàn Cortés (Cartas de Relación). In his reevaluation of such records, or such dreams, O'Gorman sounds the call for an ontological understanding of history. It will be necessary, he says, 'to reconstruct the history, not of the discovery of America, but rather of the idea that Americawas discovered.' This radical reevaluation of history has taken on increasing prominence, and it is, perhaps, time to extend O'Gorman's interrogation to the terrain of literary studies as well, that is, 'as a process producing historical entities and no longer, as has been the tradition, as a process that takes as given the existence of such entities.'

From the side of Latin America, the necessity for such a questioning seems painfully obvious, as it is painfully obvious that the concept of 'Latin America' is itself a slippery one, suggesting a cultural unity among approximately twenty-five countries with different histories, different traditions, different political systems, different geographies, different languages. Paradoxically, for many of these countries' best -607- thinkers, it is the search for this unremediably absent definition that marks the essential unity of 'Latin American' cultural identity. As E. Mayz Valenilla puts it, American Latinity constitutes itself around a sense of 'forever-not-yet-being,' a sense of permanent disequilibrium intensified by an often defensive inferiority complex toward the cultural productions of the United States and Europe, as well as an unbalancing conviction of the Latin American's anachronism not only on the world scene but within the local geographies as well. One result of such questioning is that Latin American literature often addresses the impossibility for Latin Americans of situating themselves in a specific historical moment, and reminds them of the inescapability of living simultaneously and of bridging all historical periods from the Stone Age to the Space Age. One of the most persistent dreams of Latin American literature is a longing to escape this trap and to construct a time corresponding to the Latin American space; one of the most notable effects of Latin American literature is to deconstruct that dream and that longing.

At the same time, Latin America — unproblematically defined — has come in recent years to be 'put on the map' — rediscovered or reinvented once again — for United States-European consciousness. It has been reinvented politically as Nicaragua, Colombia, El Salvador, Chile, Mexico take on new reality in our nightly news, and, with a continually renewed, strikingly anachronistic astonishment, reinvented poetically as well. The source of this baroque superabundance of superb creative work can be, for us citizens of the United States used to referring to ourselves simply as 'Americans' with a kind of unconscious superiority complex, disconcertingly exotic; the Great American Novels are arriving as an import, in translation, from that other, intermittently forgotten, America, and the names of their authors stumble hesitatingly off our monolingual tongues: Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, José Lezama Lima, João Guimarães Rosa, Domitila Barrios de Chungara (a first elemental hesitation: which is a particular author's last name, after all?), Pablo Neruda, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Julio Cortázar, Elena Poniatowska, Jorge Luis Borges, Rigoberta Menchú, Alejo Carpentier, Clarice Lispector, José Donoso, Luisa Valenzuela, Octavio Paz, Manuel Puig…

I planted the words 'baroque' and 'exotic' deliberately in the -608- previous paragraph; they are two of the key terms that echo most insistently in the North American reception of these masterpieces by the other Americans. William Gass, writing in 1980, compares the contemporary reaction to the phenomenon of the Latin American novel with the intellectually overwhelming effect of the Russian novel on the British reading public a century earlier: 'They were long, those damn books; they were full of strange unpronounceable names: loving names, childhood names, nicknames, patronyms; there were kinship relations which one can imagine disconcerting Lévi-Strauss; there was a considerable fuss made concerning the life, sorrows, and status of the peasants, the oblige of the noblesse; and about God, truth, and the meaning of life there was even more; moods came and went like clouds, and characters went mad with dismal regularity…. Must we do that again?' The answer, clearly, is 'yes.' Once again we are asked to deal with strange names, settings as mysterious and exotic as the Russian steppe, a style that, even in translation, suggests the breathtaking grandeur of the original and hints at a use of language so innovative it expands the boundaries of the possible. Notably, however, even in such a knowledgeable critic as Gass, the question is posed in anachronistic terms, a reading of late twentiethcentury fiction that reduplicates a nineteenth-century literary experience. The sense of temporal disjunction persists on other levels as well. Borges, whose most significant production is from the 1940s, continues to be read as an author of the 1970s. Alejo Carpentier (1950s) is reinvented as a contemporary, rather than a precursor, of Miguel Barnet (1980s).

The question that exercises me, a Latinamericanist transplanted into a volume on American literature largely oriented toward the United States, is that of which Latin America to invent in these pages. Should I invent a single entity analogous to the United States? Should I follow the now well-established lines of a comparatist practice of putting together García Márquez and Faulkner, Marechal and Joyce, Borges and Hawthorne, Gámbaro and Beckett, Paz and Stevens, Sarmiento and Cooper? Should I reinvent Latin America, that land of poets (three of Latin America's five Nobel Prizes have been given to poets: Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz), as a continent dominated by narrative, with just a footnote given to its most pervasive form of expression — Afro-Hispanic: Nicolás Guillén, -609- Nancy Morejón; revolutionary: Giaconda Belli, Ernesto Cárdenal; feminist: Rosario Castellanos, Julia de Burgos? Should I outline a traditional literary historical progression: costumbrismo, nineteenthcentury realism, modernismo, telluric novel, avant-garde, 'Boom,' post-Boom? How do I contextualize the fact that John Douglas edits both Avon's fantasy series and its Latin American translation series?

In 1967 John Barth published an article inspired by his love for the Argentine poet and short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges entitled 'The Literature of Exhaustion,' in which he set the Argentine master into a more general context that included references to works by James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Franz