their prime responsibilities the obligation to commit themselves to the 'mad' struggle over the history of meanings, not only to reveal the ways in which rhetorical concerns discursively construct reality, but also to intervene into and counter these processes of reality-construction. Fiction politicized is often not enough; the reading public demands more concrete manifestations of commitment. Furthermore, as Trinh Minh-ha reminds us in Woman, Native, Other, 'It is almost impossible for [writers] (and especially those bound up with the Third World) to engage in writing as an occupation without letting themselves be consumed by a deep and pervasive sense of guilt.' And she continues later with the wry observation that while committed writing, on the one hand, helps alleviate this guilt, on the other hand, it involves a simple displacement: 'Committed writers are the ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience. Bound to one another by an awareness of their guilt, writer and reader…[carry] their weight into the weight of their communities, the weight of the world. Such a definition naturally places the committed writers on the side of Power.' A similar statement might be, and often is, made in reference to fictional works in Latin America, where the tangled lines of power and commitment are peculiarly complex, where favored authors are frequently awarded political appointments of some power, and authors in disfavor face exile or death.
Along other lines, feminist literary critics, too, have been reexam-614- ining these now-classic texts. The Boom writers who engaged in the deconstruction and resemanticization of so many of the meaning systems of official mythology seem oblivious to the degree to which they reaffirm the hoary myth of the maternal body as equivalent to a state of nature and of maternal 'nature' as an unproblematic concept. This institutionalization of the figure of the feminine as a natural, primordial, but containable and manageable, element is evident even in the works of Latin America's most internationally well-known female writer, the openly feminist Chilean novelist, Isabel Allende, who has arrived belatedly on the Boom scene, twenty years after its vogue, but with the same assumptions intact. In her works, as in older Boom novels written a generation earlier, the maternal body may be a utopian site, but the mother's lack of access to subjectivity is a nonnegotiable given.
Correspondingly, the fictional existence of women — and I am thinking particularly of the much-lauded sensitivity to the feminine, indeed, the 'feminization' of the prose, of Boom writers like Gabriel García Márquez in Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) or José Donoso in El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970; The Obscene Bird of Night, 1979) — though real, is interpolated into the fiction in such a way as to highlight for the sensitive reader the insistent, and unquestioned, assumptions of an unproblematized, masculinist discursive base. Ursula Buendía, the strong mother figure of One Hundred Years of Solitude, is frequently cited by approving critics as a particularly fine example of García Márquez's sensitivity to female subjectivity. I would argue, though I do not have the space to do so here, that the case is very nearly exactly the opposite, that in Ursula the figure of the woman is displaced twice over. Masquerading as subject, as the dominant figure within the home and as the figure of sanity, she is taken informally, and more pervasively, if subtly, as object: the metaphorized discourse of woman as, problematically, constitutive of the impersonated, explicitly displaced but implicitly reconstituted, discourse of man. The case is even more obvious in Donoso's novel, where the male narrator is straightforwardly feminized (that is, castrated), turned into a woman, by the strange old hags inhabiting the convent, and reduced to a sightless, deaf — but fortunately not speechless — 'imbunche.' Donoso's character not only speaks for but as a woman, as the outcast -615- male vision of the virgin-mother-child, feminized in the impersonation of a criminal grotesque, while symbolically on his way to transformation into the ultimate phallic symbol: the 'imbunche' as transcendental signifier. In both works, significantly, the language of women's desire only enters the enclosure of the created fictional space as monstrous, and productive of monsters. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the birth of the incestuous infant with the pig's tail precipitates apocalypse; in Donoso, the grotesquely deformed 'Boy' anticipates the same function.
Jorge Luis Borges and the Colombian novelist, scriptwriter, and journalist Gabriel García Márquez represent the two archetypal figures of the Boom. Borges's Ficciones (1944; English translation, 1962) and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, though from two different generations, remain the Boom's most typical and most enduring products. Curiously, it would be difficult to imagine two writers more different in personality, politics, enduring obsessions, or literary style. García Márquez represents the Boom's search for a 'total' novel, those long, long books; Borges is the Boom's minimalist. García Márquez's narratives derive from oral storytelling and mass media; Borges's metaphysical fables ignore such influences. García Márquez rewrites Colombian history, Borges extends the implications of European idealist philosophy; García Márquez is associated with magic realism, Borges with fantasy; García Márquez's political leanings are strongly leftist, Borges's superficial apoliticism is paired to a reactionary political commitment. Yet, together they define the parameters of what the Boom has come to mean in classical literary studies.
Borges is a master of what we might call a desperate comedy of inaccessibility, marked and defined by an adamant insistence on a few, intensely imaged symbols: the dreams, the labyrinths, the mirrors, and the tigers so familiar to his readers. Likewise, he relies heavily on a few insistently reiterated metaphors. In his works we are drawn into the temptations and unrealities of mathematics, and especially the physical sciences. In Borges, as John Updike notes, 'we move…beyond psychology, beyond the human, and confront…the world atomized and vacant. Perhaps not since Lucretius has a poet so definitely felt men as incidents in space.' Thus, Borges's tenuously imagined librarians, his dreamers within the dream, his -616- immortals, and his metaphysical gauchos are so comically overdetermined, so full of meaning that they are atomized and exploded by their very richness.
Such relativization and negation reach into all levels of these confections. Carefully constructed and firmly established plot lines are demolished at a stroke through infection by impossibly corrupt, or undeniably fictitious, elements. Even at the micro-level of the noun clause the author gives us nothing firm and resistant, without also suggesting the irrational fault lines running through its architecture; he pairs abstract nouns to concrete modifiers and the reverse: 'innumerable contrition,' 'rigorously strange,' 'the interminable fragrance,' 'that equivocal and languid past,' 'the almost infinite Chinese wall,' or makes statements like 'he retired to a figurative palace,' and 'our destiny…is horrifying because it is irreversible and of iron.' In a similar manner, Borges's dreamer who dreams a real man in his story 'The Circular Ruins' reminds the reader of the singularly corrupt copy of Borges's 1917 edition of The AngloAmerican Cyclopaedia testifying to the existence of Tlön in the story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' and parallels the frustrated searches of any number of Borgesian librarians who hypothesize the existence of a Book of Books in the infinite stacks of the library of Babel, or the philosophers who attempt to discover the name of God written in the stripes of a tiger.
Certainly, Borges's dramas of dazzling combinatorics and differential decay respond to the pre-posthum(or) ous dissection of the postmodern condition, the wary, weary recognition that the search for eternal verities — God, Science, a Center — are inevitably conditioned and contaminated by the seeking mind, that the unrealities of existence militate against the very possibility of the search, much less its successful conclusion. The disturbing and seductive corollary for fiction is clear. No longer is the fictional universe bounded by classical rules of verisimilitude and plausibility; instead, it is conceived, in a fictional parallel to quantum physics, as a self-contained game with the sole responsibility of maintaining consistency to its own implicit rules. For Borges the rules are deceptively simple; in the words that Borges puts in the mouth of his character Herbert Quain in Ficciones, 'I revindicate for this work the essential elements of every game: symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium.' -617- Borges is a writer's writer. García Márquez is a cult. He has said many times that his role is to transcribe ordinary Colombian reality; the manner of this transcription, however, represents the enduring enchantment of his confections. Chilean José Zalaquett says of García Márquez that 'his One Hundred Years of Solitude hit Latin American readers much as St. Paul was struck on his way to Damascus.' Zalaquett is not far off; García Márquez's variation on marvelous realism ran through Latin America like a conversion experience. What is particularly powerful in García Márquez's hybridization of folk culture and high art is that it reflects a new, highly improvisational, cognitive mode that both emerges from Colombian history and engages with it critically, while at the same time transforming that history and that fiction into a new way of seeing.
The reader's struggle to create a historical narrative against the grain of García Márquez's texts responds to the appeal of the rhetorical mode of history as a meaningful ordering system in modern life. Frequently,
