Latin American Fiction Doesn’t Exist

Not sure I entirely agree with novelist Jorge Volpi‘s ongoing essay on Latin American fiction, though he makes a provocative argument. Basically his take is that Latin American literature started out in the best nationalistic traditions of the 19th-century European nations (agreed), but then things seriously leaped into post-national territory with the Boom authors (agreed again), and Latin America hasn’t looked back since (not so fast).

If up-to-date critics and academics pursue an essential characteristic of Latin American literature, and organize dozens of congresses from which Spanish writers are always excluded, it is because the ghosts of nationalism are still among us. Even then, nationalism was losing validity among the new Latin American writers, especially those born after 1960. Witnesses of the crumbling of socialism and the discrediting of utopias, and every day more skeptical of politics, these authors seem to have finally freed themselves from any nationalist constipation. Even though they don’t openly grumble about their origins, this fact is now merely an autobiographical footnote, not a stamp of origin for their work. Unlike their predecessors, they don’t seem to be obsessed with Latin American identity—and less for Mexican, Bolivian, or Argentinean—even if they continue to write about their countries or even about their neighbors.

I definitely agree with the whole “discrediting of utopias, and every day more skeptical of politics” thing. (In fact, I say exactly that in my essay on Horacio Castellanos Moya and the new Latin American political novel.) But I don’t see this as resulting in a loss of interest in the identity of Latin American nations (although no one that I’ve read recently seems to be interested in carving out an identity for the continent as a whole, as the Boom authors tried to).

Moya, for instance, definitely does pursue a very Central American (often Salvadorian) concept of identity. His novels are very much engaged with what it means to be a person living in those societies, to the point that he’ll even work in the specifics of recent events, although not in a “historical fiction” sort of way. I’d even say that a highly experimental author like Cesar Aira has general Argentine themes in his work, and of course Bolano was often clearly situated in a Chilean or Mexican context. I agree with Volpi that these authors aren’t “obsessed” with their nations of origin, but national issues are much, much more than a “footnote” in their work.

On the whole, though, I think I’m in agreement with Volpi. He seems to retreat from some of his more strident statements toward the end of this piece, and this certainly echoes what I said in my Moya essay:

More than discovering a continent, placing a forgotten region on the map, establishing their own spokesmen, positioning themselves as the avant-garde of the elites, the new narrators speak about their countries without the aftertaste of romanticism or of political compromise, without hopes or plans for the future, and maybe just with the proud disenchantment of one who recognizes the limits of his responsibility in front of history. Instead of presenting themselves as inventors of Latin America—the great achievement of the Boom—they seek to decipher and unarm it.

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