Like Carlos Fuentes, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's complete works include a startling variety of styles, ranging from the hilarious send-up of military jargon as applied to a regularly scheduled Amazonian prostitution service for the benefit of soldiers in a distant outpost (Pantaleón y las visitadores [1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978]), to his politically freighted version of a detective novel in ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (1986; Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1987). For Vargas Llosa, increasingly over recent years, the space of writing has become his field as well, and in all of his novels since Conversación en la catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), the writer and his writing take central roles in the unfolding narrative. Layers accumulate in the text as the reader observes the writer writing and the writer observing himself writing and reflecting on what has been written. Santiago Zavala in Conversación is a journalist, a mediocre one, who has intentionally chosen this mediocrity so as to avoid, by his resounding failure, the more banal mediocrity of conformity.
His masterpiece, La casa verde (1965; The Green House, 1968), is considered one of the very best from the outpouring of Latin American masterpieces, a worthy candidate for what Vargas Llosa calls 'the impossible novel, the total novel,' combining fantasy and realism, myth and psychological verisimilitude, simultaneously unfolding all of the potential manifestations of reality and history. A kind of tropical War and Peace, this weighty (in both senses of the word) novel carries the reader along with an imaginative force and intensity that is nothing less than mesmerizing. However, it would be a serious -622- mistake to read Vargas Llosa's call for a total fiction in terms of a simplistic or reductionist espousal of continuity, synthesis, or a single, sovereign form. The novel is impossible to summarize; it has no single plot in the conventional sense of the term. The field of action of this palimpsest, however, revolves around a bordello in Piura on the northern coast of Peru, and Santa Maria de Nieva, an underdeveloped provincial outpost of that underdeveloped country, virtually inaccessible by any but the most tortuous means. Its narrative trajectory involves three generations, thirty-five major characters, and five intricately interrelated major plots. 'Literature,' said Vargas Llosa in a famous formulation, 'is fire; it signifies nonconformism and rebellion.' For Vargas Llosa, a deeply moral author with a welldocumented concern for the problematics of the total fiction, the twinned issues of history and fiction, of fact and representation, of a past repeated, as Marx reminds us, as tragedy and as farce, signify more than the presence of a leitmotif in the work. Of such entanglements the web of the oeuvre is woven. Nevertheless, his works, as Luis Harss shrewdly writes, 'within their more or less tortuous 'realism' are much better than they ought to be.' There is a symmetry, Vargas Llosa notes, between literary and political fictions, a suspension of disbelief in the face of a systematic set of ideas. Since both are fundamentally fictions, neither can capture or organize reality in a logical, scientific fashion. Logically, then, his 'historia/novela' reveals an attempt to use history parodically, as a weapon against itself, against reality, against recognition.
It is a truism of standard Latin American literary histories that Latin American women do not write, and certainly do not write narrative. What little they do write — poetry, mostly — deserves oblivion. What narrative they produce, straightforward neorealist domestic fiction, does not stand up to comparison with the great male writers of the Boom and after, and is mercifully relegated to a mere footnote. The occasional exceptions — Western-trained and European-oriented women like Maria Luisa Bombal in Chile, Elvira Orphée, Victoria and Silvina Ocampo in Argentina, the Puerto Ricans Rosario Ferré and Ana Lydia Vega, Mexican women like Elena Garro, Margo Glantz, Barbara Jacobs, and Elena Poniatowska (whose nonHispanic-sounding last names are almost too suggestive) — neatly demonstrate the point, but they represent something of a conundrum -623- in traditional literary histories. Certainly these women refuse to subscribe to the synthetic, neatly patterned style typical of traditional nineteenth-century realism, or to the other, recognizably constructed, pseudo-disconnected narratives of the Boom. Their works, like their lives, are fragmented, other-directed, marginally fictionalized. Yet these women are the privileged minority in society and in literary history. And even among privileged women, few are accorded the accolades of strength, lucidity, intelligence: the virile virtues begrudgingly handed out to the occasional and extraordinary Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Brazilian Clarice Lispector is the one contemporary woman writer always included in a survey of Latin American great writers, although with puzzlement because, while contemporaneous with the Boom, she does not fit any of the neat categories. Clarice Lispector was born in transit to Brazil, in the Ukraine, of parents who had already left their homeland, and she arrived in Brazil at the age of two months. This fact, a mere curiosity or accident of birth that Lispector considered meaningless, is generally mentioned by way of explanation for one facet or another of Lispector's astonishing talent. She is not, by implication, really Brazilian. An otherwise perceptive Rodríguez Monegal writes, for example, 'Clarice was two months old when her parents settled in Alagoas. Because of this fact, this writer — one of the most important writers Brazil has produced — had to learn Portuguese as a foreign language'; Brazilian-born two-month-olds, by implication, would never have arrived at Lispector's markedly original deformations of Portuguese syntax. Neither is she typically Brazilian: according to Alceu Amoroso Lima, 'No one writes like Clarice Lispector. And she doesn't write like anyone.' She is not a feminist; and while her central concerns are ontological, she writes in neither an autobiographical nor psychoanalytic mode. She rejoices in a nonidentity: the Lispector /Specter evoked by Rodríguez Monegal, dressed up in the conventional, fashion-page terms for the mysteriously (mystery is the definition of the genre) attractive woman of society: 'a beautiful woman, with deep and unfathomable eyes, high Slavic cheekbones, and a mouth like a painful sensual wound….a mysterious surface.' This is the language typically used to describe the infinitely interchangeable and languishingly seductive femme fatale of B-movie and pulp novel fame. -624-
Clarice Lispector is the representative of a spectral life, the documenter of the way in which her society codes itself for confrontation — or avoidance of confrontation — with the feminine. 'I perform incantations during the solstice,' says a character in Agua viva (1974; The Stream of Life, 1989), 'specter of an exorcised dragon.' No mystic ecstasy here; Lispector's writing points to another style of approaching the unnameable, through the difficult, rock-hard process of coming to terms with the recognition of the specter as specter, in expecting little, and receiving that little as the only possible joy. Thus Lispector warns her potential readers of A paixão segundo G. H. (1964; The Passion According to G. H., 1988):
I would be happy if [this book] were read only by people with fully formed characters. People who know that an approach, of whatever sort, must be carried out gradually and laboriously — traversing even the opposite of that which is being approached. They…will understand that this book exacts nothing of anyone. To me, for example, the character G. H. little by little began to give a difficult joy; but it is called joy.
This difficult happiness is not unlike that contained in the enigmatic smile on the face of the smallest woman in the world or in the insane self-possession of Laura in the presence of the roses, both from stories in the collection Laços de família (1960; Family Ties, 1972): the fleeting happiness of transitory possession, of beauty ciphered in the minuscule, the evanescent, the happiness of minimal creature comfort, of not being devoured — yet.
All of these Boom (and post-Boom) narratives represent what González Echevarría calls 'archival fictions,' sealed into the hegemonic discourse of the masterstory. The time has come, and more than come, to historicize the Boom itself, to set ourselves at a distance from the masterstories that have dominated talk about Latin American narrative for thirty years. In his book The Voice of the Masters (1985), González Echevarría intends us to strip away the factitious complicity between language and authoritarianism, to deconstruct their unsalutary propping up and propping upon each other. He intends to achieve this object in two ways: both in the texts he studies and in the way he studies those texts. First, he says, such representatives of modern Latin American literature as Fuentes, Cortázar, and Cabrera Infante dismantle the link between authority and rhetoric -625- through the operations of their critical-literary works. Second, his own critical style, unlike the 'authoritarian' criticism he deplores, is intentionally disconnected. Such authoritarian voices, he would argue, falsify what they attempt to explain. Therefore, he proposes, the examination of literary as well as political institutions should begin with a careful critique of the language used to support them. At the end of his 1990 book, Myth and Archive, González Echevarría goes one step further in
