Kafka. It is not necessary at this point to review the history of the readings and rereadings and misreadings of Barth's article, the appreciative reception that turned 'literature of exhaustion' into a critical commonplace. I would like to note two rather interesting consequences, however. First of all, while Borges was well known and much appreciated in Latin America in his own right and as a precursor of the Boom writers, for many inhabitants of North America Barth's article was a revelation of a startling new talent on the world literary scene. Borges was, through Barth, reinvented as an American author, becoming, achronologically for Barth's readers, if not for Barth himself, the contemporary of United States fiction writers like John Hawkes, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth himself. Indeed, in a later reflection on his famous exhaustion article entitled 'The Literature of Replenishment,' John Barth becomes, unconsciously perhaps, seduced by this now-pervasive writing of contemporary literary history, and puts Borges into the group of postmodernists along with such writers as those listed above, including as well Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez (the quintessential Boom author) and Italian Italo Calvino as his contemporaries.
The second point I wish to make is that this curious violation of chronology in the conflation of two or three generations of writers is bizarrely appropriate, and both reflects and respects the implicit aesthetics of much recent Latin American literature. Just so Borges himself often violates temporal schemes in order to have books converse with each other across the shelves of a library; in one instance among many, to bring alive once again Borges's precursor, Leopoldo -610- Lugones (1874–1938), as a commentator on his miscellaneous volume of short sketches and poetry (El hacedor [1960]).
Even for a continent characterized by anachronism, the novelistic production of the early part of this century seems particularly out of step. Roberto González Echevarría's study of Rómulo Gallegos's Doña Barbara (1929; English translation, 1931), the best known of the 'telluric novels,' emphasizes just this point. The novela de la tierra, he says, suffers from a 'double anachronism' in both its writers and its critics: at the same time that the High Modernists were changing the shape of Euro-American fiction, these novels were praised and promoted for launching realist narrative in Latin America. Doña Barbara and its counterparts display a third anachronism as well; in a period of rapid urbanization, all of these novels are relentlessly rural. Doña Barbara, as the title indicates, is an allegorical tale of the conflict between civilization and barbarity set in the Venezuelan llanos (plains), a conflict worked out not so much between the two main characters, Doña Barbara and Santos Luzardo, as between the forces of Man (used advisedly) and Nature. The other great narrative tendency of the period, the indigenista novel (which is not indigenous, but pro-Indian), develops along similar lines, but with a more strongly marked element of concrete political commitment. Thus, Clorinda Matto de Turner's Aves sin nido (1889; Birds without a Nest) and later novels of this tendency expose the miserable conditions obtaining in the remote, often non-Spanish-speaking, Indian villages controlled by a creole landowner, and denounce the system that undergirds and sustains such exploitation. As is the case in Gallegos's novel, individual characters revert to position holders for a politically charged description of elemental conflict set against a realist landscape. Nevertheless, despite their anachronism, such works can and should be seen as the foundation of modern Latin American narrative. They draw a specifically Latin American landscape, populate it with characters drawn from local customs, and commit themselves to an identifiable sociopolitical program.
It is in this context of the preoccupation with specifically Latin American landscapes that we can understand the comments of Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist and precursor of the Boom generation. He suggests that the widely perceived baroque quality of Latin -611- American fiction reflects not a love of fussy ornament but a necessary response to near-universal incomprehension of the most mundane details: 'Heinrich Heine speaks to us, suddenly, of a pine and a palm tree…. The word 'pine' suffices to show us the pine; the word 'palm' is enough to define, paint, show, the palm. But the word 'ceiba'…' And here Carpentier must pause, in a baroque gesture, to define his terms, to paint a picture of a natural phenomenon equally unfamiliar to inhabitants of the lands of palm as to the lands of pine, to discover (or recover) an unacknowledged reality not only for the Eurocentric literary establishment but also for fellow Latin Americans, for fellow Cubans, and, in some essential sense, for himself. 'The word 'ceiba,'' says Carpentier, ' — the name of an American tree called by Black Cubans 'the mother of all trees' — is insufficient for people of other latitudes to see the aspect of rostrate column of this gigantic, austere, and solitary tree, as if drawn forth from another age, sacred by virtue of its lineage, whose horizontal branches, almost parallel with the earth, offer to the wind a few handfuls of leaves as unreachable to the human being as they are incapable of any movement. There it is, high on a hillside, alone, silent, immobile, with no birds living in its branches, breaking apart the earth with its enormous scaly roots…. At a distance of hundreds of meters (because the ceiba is neither a tree of association nor of company) grow some papayos, plants erupted from the first swamps of creation, with their white bodies, covered with grey medallions, their leaves open like beggars' hands, their udder-fruits hanging from their necks.' The ceiba is placed by reference to the papayo, which also requires definition, and, potentially, so on in infinite regress. Carpentier concludes, 'These trees exist…. But they do not have the good fortune of being named 'pine' nor 'palm tree' nor 'oak' nor 'chestnut' nor 'birch.' Saint Louis of France never sat in their shade, nor did Pushkin ever dedicate them a line of verse…. We must not fear the baroque, our art, born of our trees….a baroque created out of the need to name things, even though with it we distance ourselves from other fashionable techniques.'
What Carpentier sees as a culturally necessary neobaroque style distinguishes the Latin American effort from the more aesthetically motivated formal games of the seventeenth-century European tradition. Rather than a superabundance, the baroque style that typifies -612- these novels is reflected in, and derivative of, an order of experience that represents the near opposite of that excess traditionally associated with the baroque, by a need to assign names to each animal and plant, establishing its reality for a translocal audience.
More contemporary authors, writing after Carpentier, have also been deeply concerned with the issues involved in inscribing a Latin American identity for (or against) a supposedly 'universal' audience. Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes defines the linguistic challenge succinctly by reference to 'la palabra enemiga' — ambiguously, 'the word enemy' or 'the enemy word' — with all the gravity of that phrase's implicit linguistic, cultural, and political density. Fernández Retamar's Calibán eloquently explores the issue of linguistic alienation not only in relation to the Spanish-speaking Latin American's relation to indigenous and other minority peoples but also in terms of a vexed consciousness of the overriding effects of cultural imperialism. In Juan Marinello's famous formulation, 'Somos a través de un lenguaje que es nuestro siendo extranjero' [We are through (are traversed by) a language that is ours despite its foreignness (is our foreign be-ing)], Latin American literature, as an entity, is continually in crisis, continually reinventing itself, continually questioning its very existence. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to belabor the point that Latin America's most exportable literary products can be identified with the narratives of the 1950s and 1960s, where the very label applied to the group — the Boom — is an English word hinting at stock market fluctuations and atomic bomb capabilities, for many critics a marker of cultural imperialism at its worst.
Literary critics like Fernández Retamar with a particular commitment to postcolonial thought find the tracks and scars of cultural imperialism throughout Boom writing. There is no doubt that focusing, as Carpentier does, on the dynamics of narrative exchange value offers critics a justifiable method of analysis, one with premiums of its own on the literary-critical market. But Fernández Retamar would argue that such writers and critics are themselves 'commodified' by the resources of their respective choices of literary code, by the analytical traditions they so ably manipulate. He uncovers the extent to which the implied value system recommodifies the native subject into yet another version of the stereotypical object of a Westernized gaze, an unreconstructed Shakespearean Caliban, in this case one in which -613- a non-Western author inserts himself into a system that many other non-Westerners have, with good reason, found to be peripheral, if not totally alien, to their own traditional views. Thus, suspiciously, the adulated Third World writer or critic can be neatly inserted into a (white) critical discourse through the distortional, patronizing mythologies of the quaintly exotic. Furthermore, Fernández Retamar adds, the valued indigenous tradition is itself produced and reified, in very concrete ways, by European thinkers and their postcolonial heirs.
Writing in Latin America is often carried out under dismal conditions either at home or in exile, under the pressure of long days spent in other work, against the instituted situations of subtle or overt censorship, sometimes with the risk of imprisonment, torture, disappearance. Critics and authors of fiction alike have recognized as one of
