After Macondo: Latin American Literature and the 1960s

Samuel Steinberg is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on Mexico, 1968, and the specters thereof. His work has appeared in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and is forthcoming in CR: New Centennial Review.

Como irreversible proceso de ruptura, la revolución en América latina está en marcha. Jaime Mejía Duque (1974)

t has been extensively noted that the Spanish American narrative Boom’s decline forecasts those of nationalpopular-centered, emancipatory sequences of the twentieth century. Whether gratuitous or deserved, the perceived relation of this decline to, variously, the overthrow of the Popular Unity government in Chile, the destruction of the Mexican student movement, the defeat of guerilla groups on a continental scale, as well as the discrediting of the Cuban Revolution is a forceful and compelling site of Latin Americanist reflection. Our discipline maintains as secret legacy a perceived connection between particular forms of literary culture and certain political desires, which enters a period of both intensity and disarticulation in the 1960s. Latin American literature both culminates and enters its definitive crisis with the Boom. In perhaps the most agreed upon version of this story, the Boom novels “consolidate” the state through a thematic-narrative moment, as well as through their role in constituting a reading public, and yet, the Boom also represents a point of entry to the transnational field, which implies a kind of telling of the Latin American secret to the even greater transnational reading public whose contribution to book sales is partly what defines the Boom as such. This entry constitutes its trans- or post-national moment, and is also emblematic of larger, epochal trends with respect to the

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Mejía Duque, an ideological and political ambiguity—entails that the Boom is not itself capable of “overcoming” this ambiguity, which constitutes a strangely “successful” exteriorization of the Cuban Revolution in spite of not only the waning of the Boom’s commitment to that revolution, but also, more generally, its failure to secure its own stake in the Latin American social field, despite (as a result of ) its own social force (that is, despite the fact that it appears in this revolutionary atmosphere). Yet, as I hope to show, we can still retrace a specific and resonant opening to the overcoming of this ambiguity in the rhetorical de-constitution of the Boom. As Brett Levinson writes, “Closure is the assignment of the literary” (4). Perhaps in this sense the Boom should be defined by its gesture of literary self-cancellation, which forms its retreat from the possibility of its social insertion, a retreat that simultaneously claims the only possible literary politics. To understand closure as the task of the literary is to posit the Boom’s “deconstructive” moment as its political promise, as precisely that moment in which it is most “internal” to the Cuban Revolution. I will consider the Boom’s vicissitudes here by reflecting upon three moments of particular intensity, which taken together, offer a kind of narrative sketch for the conception of literature and emancipatory politics in sixties-era Latin America for which I am arguing. Thus, the first section reads Fidel Castro’s 1961 Palabras a los intelectuales, a programmatic political and aesthetic statement that to some degree orients art and politics for the decade to come. The second and third sections of this article, in turn, engage perhaps the most widely read and relevant of Boom authors, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, keeping Castro’s program in mind. I note from the outset, however, that this argu-

social insertion of culture. Latin American literature’s circulation far beyond Latin America forms both an entry of literature as well as Latin American difference—because the latter was both internationally constituted as well as locally sutured through literature—into the market. Along these lines we might understand the sense in which the Boom maintains two contradictory alliances: one to the national-popular/ planning state, the other to a transnational literary market. Following this symptomatic appearance of the Boom, what remains for literature and literary theory is a reflection upon what the literary can still accomplish and under what terms might it secure the future of its own social being, if at all. I take as a point of departure an essay written by Colombian critic Jaime Mejía Duque, “El ‘Boom’ de la narrativa latinoamericana,” published in 1974. From a perspective that Neil Larsen has described as “revolutionary-historicist” (69), Mejía Duque addresses what he refers to as its “constitutive ambiguity:”
También alienta ahí la razón profunda, la ‘razón histórica,’ de que para la conciencia general en América Latina tanto como en Europa y aun más allá, el ‘boom’—fenómeno particularmente capitalista—apareciera funcionando en una articulación viva y agitacional con la revolución. Esto es lo que denominamos la ambigüedad constitutiva del ‘boom.’ Precisamente por ser eso—constitutiva—no era superable por el ‘boom’ mismo. (133)

Mejía Duque provides the militant version of a reading of the Boom which has become more or less canonical.1 As registered here, the constitutive nature of this tension—for

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ment does not commence a “reading” of Boom texts in the way one might expect. Rather, I mean to develop an understanding of the Boom and its place within a genealogy of the decline of the project of the left as what we might designate, put in Bruno Bosteels’s terms, a significant site of artistic-political suturing/unsuturing. More specifically, the Boom renders visible how and where the arts are linked (and unlinked) to politics in sixties-era Latin America. Yet, in this making-visible, it becomes a crisis of artistic-political suture. In this sense, we might look to the Boom today as a point of rhetorical resolution of the relation between art and politics, between, more particularly, modernist literature and the revolutionary dreams of the sixties.

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notable. The formulation he employs peculiarly invokes an antinomy between inside and outside that has served, among other uses, as the thought-image for today’s capitalism. In the conceptualization offered, we encounter a curious, if imprecise duplication or mirror image of capital space. Castro asks (or wonders aloud): “¿Cuáles son los derechos de los escritores y de los artistas revolucionarios o no revolucionarios?” He answers: “Dentro de la Revolución: todo; contra la Revolución: ningún derecho (APLAUSOS)” (2).2 The suggestion of an “inside” to the revolution creates the expectation of an “outside,” which is not referenced here. In its place we find, rather, “dentro”’s uncommon prepositional partner, “contra,” as a curious resolution to the parallelism, or rather as the conclusion of the expected parallelism that blocks the fulfillment of rhetorical promise. This “every right, inside”/“no right, against” is guaranteed to all writers and artists; whether they are revolutionary or not revolutionary, they must all remain “inside” the revolution. There is no leaving, there is no outside. What remains is a position “against” revolution, which the writer or artist is now always already within. This position “against” must thus be futile or fundamentally obscure, circumscribed as it is by the removal or cancellation of rights, indeed of all rights, for there can be only “every right” and “no right” granted to intellectuals within revolution. Revolution can grant no rights outside of revolutionary dispensation because revolution is the condition of rights and the final right. For revolution, Castro notes, also has a right—it has a “right to exist.” It must exert this right to exist not only against old-school counterrevolution, but also against today’s capitalism, which, as Fredric Jameson once noted in a famous formulation:

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The 1961 text Palabras a los intelectuales, in which Fidel Castro offers a programmatic address on culture and politics to an assembly of intellectuals, provides an early diagnosis of the ambiguous status of literature as well as culture in general during revolutionary times. It leads us most directly to the point at which politics and art are linked, to the socio-political demand made upon the literary. As the Cuban leader notes, over the course of the three-day meeting, he has listened with great interest to the concerns of Cuban intellectuals and artists. He dismisses these concerns as the paranoid expression of the question of whether the revolution will stamp out artistic and intellectual freedom (7). It is here that Cuba’s leader expressly delimits something like the space of revolution. That is, he recasts revolution as a phenomenon in space. It is not the only time he has done so, but the centrality this text grants culture as a mode of articulating and dividing this space is

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[...] ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity. (Postmodernism 49)

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course, neatly authoritarian) revolutionary space that is equally, if only conceptually, immanent. The oppositional strategy that remains by way of this prescription is to be against the revolution and not outside of it. Yet, the question of whether cultural workers will betray or will support revolution only obtains in the first place for those artists and intellectuals in a place of indecision. Revolutionary writers and artists, according to Castro, know precisely their responsibility and will always act with fidelity to revolution. Truly anti-revolutionary intellectuals, on the other hand, also know their duty: to be the absolute enemy that is against, and because against, also, and finally, a persistent symbolic presence of an order outside revolution (that is, of Cuba’s external enemies). It is this enemy, as internal limit of the insular order, which must be eliminated in order to also eliminate symbolically the outside of revolution. Castro here installs an insular political reason: to be against is to be outside of that reason and thus to deserve no right, to thus be treated as an absolute enemy (unless, of course, that enemy is willing to undergo correction and incorporate himself into this order of rights).3 But there is yet a third position named by Castro, a position that is neither friend nor foe: the “field of doubt.” As Castro puts it, “El campo de la duda queda para los escritores y artistas que sin ser contrarrevolucionarios no se sienten tampoco revolucionarios” (8). This field of indecision, however, must also be liquidated, not necessarily by force, but as a result of the process by means of which “[…] esa Revolución económica y social tiene que producir inevitablemente también una Revolución cultural […]” (4). Put in other terms, this realm of indecision must be transformed by revolution into a much more unambiguous matter.

Castro’s failure to name that which is outside of revolution underlines the prescient nature of his intervention, for we may well deduce that Castro has recognized the key features of late capitalism just as these transformations were underway. As Jameson notes in a text published a few years earlier,
Late capitalism can […] be described as the moment in which the last vestiges of Nature which survived on into classical capitalism are at length eliminated: namely the third world and the unconscious. The 60s will then have been the momentous transformational period in which this systematic restructuring takes place on a global scale. (“Periodizing the Sixties” 207)

Faced, then, with the intense expansion of late capital that the sixties inaugurates, Castro postulates an alternative, prescriptive spatiality for the revolution that contests capitalism by way of a curious and contradictory structural redoubling of the spatial logic of capital itself, that is, by way of a spatial logic that is conceived as an “inside” without an “outside.” Late capital’s immanence, its tendential conquest of “extraterritorial enclaves,” a task, according to Jameson, that commences globally in the sixties, is resolved in Castro’s formulation by a kind of total communist insularity, which constitutes an unambiguous world apart from capital’s threatened extension. Put in other terms, in order to oppose capital, Castro creates a quite suggestive (and, of

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If capitalism proposed to eliminate its opposite (socialism) and conquer its exterior, and once provided the grounds for thinking the world on such terms, we must consider the exterior of a putatively Marxist-Leninist space. What is visible to the revolution as the possible outside to revolution? On the one hand, both “outside” and “against,” we find the Alliance for Progress, transnational capital, and Yankee imperialism, but on the other, “outside,” and not “against,” in the space of “constitutive ambiguity,” remains the narrative Boom, which is caught in a strange zone of indecision as an exterior cultural form that sympathizes with the revolution, which is inspired by the revolution, but which is not completely of the revolution. The social presence of the Boom thus announces both the extensive symbolic success of the revolution, as well as its effective insularity. As Mejía Duque asserts:
Aunque producido en el contexto cultural y político creado por la revolución cubana, y en tal sentido indirectamente subsidiario de ella, el ‘boom’ no era ni hubiera podido ser hecho interno de esta revolución […]. (138)

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In what must appear today like a blatent example of the appropriation of intellectual and cultural work by the state (or rather, by a certain conception of the state), I cite Lázaro Cárdenas’s note of approval for Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz. Arguably the Mexican president most “faithful” to the principles of the Mexican Revolution, here, some years after his presidency, and in light of a perceived degeneration of the Mexican Revolution, he provides the coordinates for inscribing Fuentes’s novel into revolutionary history—into a faithful revolutionary history. The ex-president writes:
Gracias por el envío de su novela más reciente, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, la que he leído con el mismo interés que las anteriores, encontrando en ésta también una profunda interpretación de los sentimientos y de la actividad ante de los seres que se desenvuelven en los distintos medios que usted describe en sus novelas con tanta fidelidad. Además de sus reconocidas cualidades como escritor, me parece que la fuerza de sus novelas reside en la intención revolucionaria que proyectan unida la fina sensibilidad del intelectual estrechamente ligado a la vida de su pueblo y la inquietud del joven escritor que busca una nueva y vigorosa técnica literaria. Esperamos con interés creciente sus nuevas obras literarias que hacen honor a México, aquí y en el extranjero. (n.p.)

II

By turning now to Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz, we will see a rather clear polemic around how a particular Boom novel locates itself/is located within revolution. More precisely, I will argue that this novel exemplifies both the use of the literary object for the reconstitution of the national-popular in the name of the Mexican Revolution—a certain Mexican Revolution, in any case—as well as the novel’s use of the Cuban Revolution as an extraterritorial zone of utopian fantasy and cultural-political self-authorization.

Here again, the Boom novel resides at this intersection between its international extension and the national-popular, conveying a revolutionary form and content.4 Fuentes is said to honor Mexico at home

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author’s commercial success, his stardom, undermines his possible solidarity with something like the common destiny of the popular, a solidarity which the Cuban Revolution (and not the Boom) commands regionally and articulates to a global public (122). He continues:
El escritor del “boom” llega a ser, desde la plataforma de un mercado en expansión vertiginosa, un nombre que vale por sí solo, un ente metafísico imbuído de esa deidad: Una firma. (122)

and abroad by presenting the image of revolution to both international as well as national reading publics. Fuentes’s text, according to Cárdenas, demonstrates his link to the Mexican people. Significantly, the quotation appears on the back cover of an edition published by the Fondo de cultura económica, for their “colección popular.” Cárdenas thus authorizes, even sanctifies, this relation between the national-popular, the writer, the transnational field, and finally, emancipatory politics, all of which is reiterated in the collection’s mission statement, which also appears on the novel’s back cover. It reads:
La COLECCIÓN POPULAR significa un esfuerzo editorial—y social—para difundir entre núcleos más amplios de lectores, de acuerdo con normas de calidad cultural y en libros de precio accesible y presentación sencilla pero digna, las modernas creaciones literarias de nuestro idioma, los aspectos más importantes del pensamiento contemporáneo y las obras de interés fundamental para nuestra América. (n.p.)

By now the novel begins to form a museum of a relation between literature and the national-popular. Already noteworthy is the extent to which the national publishing industry is at pains to contain Fuentes’s text, to resignify it, to produce its commensurability with the emancipation of the national-popular (both in Mexico, as well as in “our America”). Mejía Duque, on the contrary, asserts that the Boom’s potentials for promoting regional emancipation are largely blocked by the extent to which the Boom reflects a “commercial enterprise,” rather than an aesthetic movement. In other words, the

Reading Mejía Duque strongly, it would appear that rather than the emergence of a singular artistic mastery, the Boom signifies the exact opposite. This signature appears on editorial contracts and presages the gradual professionalization and self-commodification of the author. The signature also finds its way onto the novels themselves, frequently inscribing the aura of place, of the local, by way of referring the novel constantly to a concrete historical situation. It is thus worth reflecting upon the way in which Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz inscribes both authorial professionalization (signature-ascontract; name/book-as-commodity) as well as an incomplete solidarity with the Cuban Revolution (signature-within-revolution). Fuentes’s novel closes with a rather conventional form of authorial signature: “La Habana, mayo de 1960 / México, diciembre de 1961” (316). As the commonplace goes, in Fuentes’s moment, Havana assumes the status of the site from which a critical evaluation of the Mexican Revolution might be ventured.5 It might also be said that the route the signature evokes—from revolutionary Havana to Mexico City—might also serve as an allegory of the author’s own ideological posture, that is, as an allegory

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of his journey from revolution back home, from “inside” revolution and back to its “outside.”6 More forcefully, it would not merely be a flight of fancy to suggest that the otherwise customary and unremarkable inscription of place with which Fuentes closes his novel in this case implies an assertion of the revolutionary “every right” that Castro promises, which might well be understood as Fuentes’s “every right” to appropriate the revolution as image-space as a means of dramatically and heroically launching his name—linked to popular emancipation on various fronts—into a transnational literary world. That is, while the market secures distribution and proliferation, “revolution” (and more generally, evocation of the “local”) assures marketability to a world in which revolution was on the move, to recall the Mejía Duque quotation that serves as my epigraph. Cuba and its revolution serve the Boom as a center of regional pride and international curiosity, just as Cuba continues to serve, adopting Jameson’s vocabulary, as an extraterritorial foothold for a reason still putatively external or contrary to capital’s purview and which keeps utopian dreams alive.7 It is in this sense that Cuba becomes a further instrument through which the writer authorizes his project and sends it into the marketplace. While Fuentes’s inscription projects the Cuban Revolution, it also protects it and commands its insularity. Such appears to be the critique of the Boom mounted by Roberto Fernández Retamar in his canonical Calibán. Fernández Retamar’s text already begins to register the limitations of a kind of self-evident and self-policing revolutionary space by speaking of culture in terms that recognize the isolation of the revolutionary project: the essay appears now as a kind of noble last stand for a reconceptualization of a culture of revolution. In this context, the

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ramifications of the Padilla affair seem most decisive for Calibán, for it was then that many of the Boom’s writers reevaluated their relationship to the Cuban Revolution.8 The polemical text finally and decisively separates friends and allies (of the revolution) from its enemies. Fernández Retamar collects the former beneath the sign of Calibán. Among many others, the gathering includes comrades as diverse as Zapata, Castro, Arguedas, and Fanon, all of whom share the culture of Calibán, which will become the mark of the insular, the local, the minor, and, thus, the possibilities of liberation. Fernández Retamar passionately asks, “[...] what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Calibán?” (14). At a time when revolutionary hopes were on the verge of a global letdown, Calibán/Cuba would stand as the continued possibility of a utopian, revolutionary enclave—as the place of difference itself—even as the space of that utopia seemed to succumb evermore to internal and external aggressions, to both counterrevolution as well as its own perceived repressiveness. To be sure, one does not find listed here the treacherous fellowtravelers of the Boom, like Fuentes, much less constant enemies, like literary critic and “servant of imperialism” Emir Rodríguez Monegal (14). In this way, the text divides Calibán from the enemy, the popular from the hegemonic, Martí’s “Nuestra América” from Sarmiento’s Facundo. Calibán centers on the staging of cultural politics as the site of a political struggle for liberation, taking the Boom’s substitution of aesthetics for politics to its limit.9 Fernández Retamar’s essay thus returns to literary history in an attempt to reorganize it around questions of militancy and commitment, around the new mode of reading required under revolutionary dispensation. Accordingly, Facundo is to be rejected as a violent and

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ideological content: through Marxism-Leninism, the revolution declares not only its political project, but also more importantly its very being. Until this moment it must be assumed that the revolution is merely a vague upheaval, an open, unnamed occurrence for all who, like Fuentes, would claim it for themselves. The Marxist-Leninist declaration serves as yet another crucial separation. After this revolution within the revolution, to borrow a phrase from Régis Debray, those who would seek to authorize themselves in the revolution’s name begin to feel not a little discomfort, which is only amplified by Padilla’s show trial and imprisonment, here referred to with almost humorous understatement as “a Cuban writer’s month in jail.” While from a certain perspective Fernández Retamar merely takes Fuentes to task regarding his less than revolutionary politics, the vehemence of this debate, the violence with which Fuentes must be denounced suggests more. As Brett Levinson writes:
The debate whether the Boom is radical or conservative, an intervention into the market or a movement that plays to the market [...] misses a key point. The Boom stamps the convergence of these opposites. In the Boom, the reactionary and radical components of literature are exposed not as one but as coincidental. (23)

subalternizing representation of Argentina, while Martí is to be celebrated as an alternative, as a possible inversion or overturning of such a literary model. Through these paradigmatic past texts, Fernández Retamar projects the cultural field of future political struggle, which is to be waged, in part, against the authority that both traitors and enemies consolidated for themselves during the Boom era. Fernández Retamar strikes out with particular fury against Fuentes, who, as we have seen, began a Boom novel, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, according to the authorial signature at its conclusion, in Havana in May of 1960. In this sense, Fuentes stands as an early example of a certain appropriation of the revolution. The suggestion appears to be that unlike Borges, a truly important writer who “decided to adopt openly his position as a man of the Right” (30), Fuentes disingenuously falsifies his leftist credentials in a bid to secure his place in letters as a means of compensating for his apparent lack of talent. As Fernández Retamar continues, he speaks of a “Mexican mafia,” of which Fuentes is a standing member:
This group warmly expressed its sympathy for the Cuban Revolution until, in 1961, the revolution proclaimed itself and proved to be Marxist-Leninist—that is, a revolution that has in its forefront the worker-peasant alliance. From that day on, the support of the mafia grew increasingly diluted up to the last few months when—taking advantage of the wild vociferation occasioned by a Cuban writer’s month in jail—they broke obstreperously with Cuba. (30)

It would seem that the revolution only arrives, for Fernández Retamar, after the decisive declaration of its Marxist-Leninist

By way of exploiting his position “outside” and not “against,” finally becoming a figure that collapses this distinction (or that marks the point of its convergence), Fuentes renders legible the need to impose a line between friends and enemies as increasingly an instrumental necessity for a certain mode of thought to continue. This debate, in other

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words, is a fake that distracts those who wage it from the future to which literature and politics will both submit, a future that is symptomatically made present in both the Boom as well as the Cuban Revolution. By way of understanding this future—our present—we look now to a moment in which literature faces the future by imposing its own closure to the social world in which it circulated and grounded its legitimacy.

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to lose itself in the moment of its greatness. The above would suggest that if the Boom today appears as a fallen movement, a failure, it is perhaps because we have not yet fully recognized the epochal, transitional drive it had. That is, if its ability to finalize, to give end, to blow itself up, is what the Boom now commemorates, this self-cancellation might stand as its apology to a politics of liberation and to the revolutionary sequences of the sixties. It seems possible, after all, that a dominant feature of the Boom was not the mediation of a profoundly conflicted Latin American modernity, but rather, a working out of those conflicts as the very limit of literature’s political potential. I would like to suggest, in short, that rather than some kind of appropriating instrument to be supplanted, as critics such as Fernández Retamar have proposed, the Boom is already Latin American literature’s desire for negation, its desire to dissolve literature’s constitutively treacherous socio-political presence. As Brett Levinson forcefully notes:
When we cannot distinguish ‘literature as intervention’ from ‘literature as conservation,’ when aesthetic innovation, revolt, disturbance, and difference represent entrances into the market, into the Same, literature ceases both to sustain and disrupt the social dichotomies upon which the globe banks and thus concludes its modern function. (28)

III
If the Boom’s decline is a constant, if at times unintentional, invention of the Boom itself as a political commitment, then perhaps the Boom is not lost after a failed attempt at mediating global and local, market and culture, the revolution and liberal democracy. Rather the Boom is itself a calling into being of its own failure as a pseudo-ethical act, or rather a commitment. With the Boom Latin American literature eventually denies itself as political form in order to protect the future of an emancipatory politics, in effect, in order to cancel the substitution of aesthetics for politics, for if Latin American literature becomes subject to the transnational market during the Boom, then the autonomy of planning state is simultaneously threatened by transnational forces. It is through this fact that we might understand both Castro’s and Fernández Retamar’s cultural critique as well as their attempts to distance the Cuban Revolution and emancipatory politics in general from certain cultural forms. Yet the Boom is outside of revolution. As we have seen, revolution cannot definitively stamp out that which lives beyond the reach of its insular order. For this reason, self-cancellation is uniquely the power of the Boom and its only remaining power as an emancipatory politics. Indeed, it enacts this power in a bid

The Boom’s self-negation thus hinges upon its own epiphanic realization (a moment of realization, indeed, that follows the aesthetic norms of the Boom novels themselves) that it has been complicit in the dissolution of the imagined wall of separation between market functions and rebellion, that it provides certain grounds for indecision in revolutionary times.

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escrito en ellos era irrepetible desde siempre y para siempre porque todas las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad no tenían una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra. (448-49)

As I note above, Ángel Rama offers the publication of Cien años de soledad—according to many definitions the culmination of the Boom at its most widely intelligible moment—as a possible moment of its closure (“El ‘boom’” 85-86). This is not only true in the sense that Cien años de soledad became so genre-defining that it closed the very meaning of the Boom. Nor is it merely that the novel’s extensive international circulation and continued popularity have functioned as a reductive emblem for the whole of Latin American culture. It seems also that the novel itself ends in a kind of prescriptive cancellation of writing, conceived as a mode of bringing into being a liberated Latin American modernity. It would seem that García Márquez ends his great book by learning the lesson of the sixties. The book does not mark a failure, but an apprenticeship in the problematic linking of literature to the political. As the reader will remember, the text concludes in its own erasure:
Macondo era ya un pavoroso remolino de polvo y escombros centrifugado por la cólera del huracán bíblico, cuando Aureliano saltó once páginas para no perder el tiempo en hechos demasiado conocidos, y empezó a descifrar el instante en que estaba viviendo, descifrándolo a medida que lo vivía, profetizándose a sí mismo en el acto de descifrar la última página de los pergaminos, como si se estuviera viendo en un espejo hablado […]. Sin embargo, antes de llegar al verso final ya había comprendido que no saldría jamás de ese cuarto, pues estaba previsto que la ciudad de los espejos (o los espejismos) sería arrasada por el viento y desterrada de la memoria de los hombres en el instante en que Aureliano Babilonia acabara de descifrar los pergaminos, y todo lo

Against the better judgment of one who has pretensions of speaking as a critic and not as a fan, I am tempted to concede to García Márquez the last word. As Jean Franco reminds us, “García Márquez’s Macondo only needed to be mentioned for people to understand that it was a fantasy of a liberated territory” (7). In this sense, the text evokes Cuba’s insular liberation and the kind of literary imaginary that necessarily sustains such liberations. Carlos Fuentes’s characterization of the text makes even more explicit the relation between literature and utopian thought/practice. Fuentes writes, “La fundación de Macondo es la fundación de Utopía […]. Como la Utopía de Moro, Macondo es una isla de la imaginación” (La nueva novela 60). However, this imagined utopia, this liberated island, is organized by its own undoing. In this literary cancellation resides the rhetorical—but not necessarily effective—cancellation of the ambiguous frontier dividing two enemy spatio-political orders. Cien años de soledad suggests, in other words, the taking root of an alteration in literature’s social insertion between the national-popular and transnational market, which perhaps might be best understood as a kind of decision to no longer reproduce the national-popular or work for its emancipation in writing. Cien años de soledad is, in other words, a book between literature’s commitment to the national-popular and the planning state and that which succeeds it. It is, in this sense, not the high point of this relation, but the sign of its cancellation. We may wish to understand Macondo, the

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peculiar spatial enclave that appears centrally in Cien años de soledad, as the product of the author’s prescience, as a thinking of what must come after Macondo. Macondo is the point of degeneration of the utopian, the self-realized futility of phantasmatic insular liberations, whether forwarded by writing or the state. García Márquez’s text registers most ambivalently the vicissitudes of utopian regional or local thinking in precisely the moment during which the nation-state/literature seemed to be losing ground as a primary organ of hegemonic articulation, yet when the perceived fulfillment of the global or transnational field had not yet forged other, alternative modes of representing a given social field. In other words, he writes this novel in the midst of a kind of literary decay, but before anything had arrived to replace (or displace) the literary as such (say, testimonio, cultural studies, new media, and so on). Suffice it to say, written as a kind of midwife text for the transition towards a new epoch, the novel closes the literature-emancipatory politics alliance that characterizes much of Latin America’s literary modernity. As Ángel Rama writes:
Cuando en el año sesenta y siete la publicación de Cien años de soledad cierra un determinado período de la obra de García Márquez, también corona un proyecto que comienza a esbozarse y a plantearse a fines de la década del cuarenta; y ese proyecto, que en varios textos iniciales de García Márquez comienza a delinearse, es justamente el de representar una literatura nacional y popular. (Edificación 30) [e]nfrentamiento de materiales que se destruyen a sí mismos, y que, simultáneamente, generan la posibilidad de unas formas superiores de las cuales emerja la línea interna zigzagueante que va desarrollando la cultura. (30)

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This novel culminates a project because, for Rama, it represents a dialectical advance, understood as the:

Perhaps what Rama observes here is the expression of García Márquez’s willing conceptual inclusion in the insular revolutionary order. His novel thematizes the destruction of writing as a submission to Castro’s programmatic statement by means of which, as I cite above, “[…] esa Revolución económica y social tiene que producir inevitablemente también una Revolución cultural […]” (4). Macondo’s dissolution thus represents an advance for thought and politics, figuring the symbolic-effective extension of the Cuban Revolution, not in the obscure fashion in which “opportunists” have made it circulate, but rather as a power over writing. I take this chance to refer my argument to one made by Alberto Moreiras in his Exhaustion of Difference with respect to José María Arguedas’s suicide, which he casts as both literary-symbolic as well as actual-effective. “With Arguedas’s literary act,” he writes, “Latin American foundational utopianism comes to its end” (207). It is here that literature closes itself off from its power to mediate and resolve the social conflicts characteristic of the Latin American nation-states; literature loses—in this “literary act”—its power and razón de ser. Macondo’s dissolution, going further, marks literature’s cancellation of literature precisely as a commitment to revolutionary utopias, founded in the collective social subject that once answered to the name of the national-popular. Such desires can only be achieved, after García Márquez’s literary

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turns on the repetition of Macondo’s dissolution, which in turn poses a challenge to any expectation of Macondo’s eventual redemption. This very repetition suggests the way in which the spectral continuity of literature is literature’s bid to constantly void redemption. In this sense, the Boom continues as its own constant self-cancellation. Macondo’s dissolution, which, as I note above, at some point seemed to aver a radical rupture, is by the time of Crónica de una muerte anunciada, a ritual that saturates the text. This now ritualistic literary cancellation, in effect, presents itself as the only way of grounding the writing task and allowing it to continue after Macondo. If García Márquez rather melodramatically sweeps away Macondo in what might be the more celebrated self-imposed literary cancellation, Crónica de una muerte anunciada reiterates this closure. Crónica de una muerte anunciada produces its own death as a comment on its own writing as a failed project, as a dying labor, but in this case formally, and thus, generically. This double cancellation, it is worth repeating, represents the emergence for literature of a new razón de (no) ser following the termination of the political forms of social integration and emancipation that previously had organized and legitimated the Latin American literary task.11 Carlos J. Alonso begins his conclusions on Crónica de una muerte anunciada by noting how the text seems to comment on the very failure of the writing task. He writes:
Writing, the suggestion appears to be, cannot serve as the instrument for redemption and cleansing that the novel envisions, since it is itself constituted and sustained through a violence that traverses it to the very core. (162)

act, through a revolutionary politics proper (again, over against the historical alliance literature-state). The text seems, as Bruno Bosteels has put it, programmatically, to “unsuture art and politics” (158). Through the erasure of Macondo, a figure for the utopian enclave, this unsuturing commences. The novel foresees the loss of the potential of all such liberated territories in writing, that is, the loss of obscure imaginary liberated territories. Through the reading act the potential of imagined liberated territory dissolves, is cancelled and dispersed in the air; it disappears, and we are yet condemned for betraying revolution by believing that our liberation could ever have been read. The text thus not only stands as a statement on the fallen status of the political and social insertion of the writer’s intervention, but more strongly, brings this fallen status into being. A re-appropriation of this act of literary-utopian self-cancellation might rescue us yet from a static relation to literature as a contingency of the market, to emancipatory politics as a failed project. Macondo’s dissolution marks a closure of literature and revolutionary-utopian politics, but it is also an opening. What remains to be seen, even today, is whether that opening is a call to forgiveness between literature and revolution, or instead, a chance to cut our losses by forging a different politics beyond the reaches of literature, a politics that resides neither in the domain of culture, nor in its negation, and always without literature’s redemption. Unlike Arguedas, García Márquez lives on and must commit to repetition. The community figured in García Márquez’s later novel, Crónica de una muerte anunciada, possesses a structural similarity to Macondo, and not only with respect to its status as territorial enclave.10 By way of concluding, I would like to suggest that Crónica de una muerte anunciada

Samuel Steinberg
Alonso argues that the text itself is organized or reigned by its own reflection on writing as a possible “instrument for redemption and cleansing” (162), a redemption, one should add, no longer offered through the national-popular and the planning state whose desire the novel once promised to embody or inspire. This writing thus allegorizes, to put it in other terms, literature’s own decline as an instrument through which the national-popular might emerge and the planning state might effectively imagine social justice. The text can protect neither the Latin American secret, nor its own appearance as literature and thus effaces its textuality.
This knowledge [...] also appears to be incorporated into the novel as a persistent attempt to eradicate the structure of differences on which the text is constructed. Seen in this light, Chronicle of a Death Foretold seems to be forever on the verge of reverting to a state of undifferentiation that would jeopardize the system of differences that rules the text. (162)

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of that cancellation. A widely known anecdote holds that García Márquez forswore writing another novel as long as Pinochet held power in Chile. Only one novel, El otoño del patriarca, stands between the writing of Cien años de soledad and Crónica de una muerte anunciada. Yet, Crónica de una muerte anunciada appeared in 1981, long before Pinochet would pass from the scene. While this gap evinces the futile power of literary silence, equally compelling is the repetition of literary cancellation witnessed by García Márquez’s return to form. From the perspective of literature—after the Boom, after Macondo—there must be repetition of this literary non-redemption, which organizes the constant interruption of our own desire to reconstitute literature’s socio-political grounds and task.

The erasure that Alonso observes in the text, which is effected in distinct and diverse manners but particularly through similarities between characters’ names, finally evinces its own “[...] violent essence, demonstrating that it must speak the contradictory knowledge that it embodies even at the expense of its own unmaking” (163). Along the lines of Cien años de soledad, Crónica de una muerte anunciada cancels itself by way of fulfilling its own narrative order. This repetition, however, should not be read as the recovery of some kind of “failed” attempt at decisive literary cancellation in the case of Cien años de soledad, but rather as the hope of continuing the very meaning

As Larsen notes, scholars such as Gerald Martin share this understanding of the Boom as being “overdetermined” by the Cuban Revolution and the atmosphere it created (70). In Larsen’s excellent essay, he regards this “revolutionaryhistoricist” critical optic as the one that “[…] brings us closest to the complex truth of the phenomenon itself ” (70), at least compared to what he calls the “aestheticist” approach of the Boom authors themselves or the “vulgar sociological standpoint” adopted by Rama in the essay “El ‘boom’ en perspectiva.” It is worth noting that both Mejía Duque as well as Rama appear in the present essay as symptoms of what Larsen insightfully names, in a gloss on Halperín Donghi, the “seeming right/left aphasia of the ‘boom’” (72). 2 For an excellent reading of this speech, see Desiderio Navarro’s “In Media Res Publicas: On Intellectuals and Social Criticism in the Cuban Public Sphere.” Here I take the chance to thank him for alerting me to this passage. 3 My understanding of the friend/enemy divide as a key dimension of the political is informed, above all, by a series of texts in which
1

Notes

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tional left to sever ties with Cuba. 9 The point of reference here is Idelber Avelar, who has argued most clearly that Boom narrative exerted something like a compensatory function for the uneven or incomplete modernization of Latin America, a compensatory function that produced not merely the aestheticization of politics but the “substitution of aesthetics for politics” (11). 10 I will briefly recall the novel. The text’s central event is the murder of Santiago Nasar. Because we know who killed him and how, the narrator’s curious search for the truth revolves around a different question. The purportedly central secret—whether Santiago Nasar truly went to bed with Ángela Vicario (his murderers’ sister)—is never resolved. 11 Crónica de una muerte anunciada repeats Cien años de soledad in other ways as well. The duplication of the character Mercedes Barcha, future wife of the narrator/García Márquéz, in both texts, of which Luis Alonso Girgado reminds us (63), suggests further the continuity between the two narratives. More notable is the repetition of the name Aureliano Buendía, as not only an intertextual function but as a marker of something like a time lapse between the two texts’ writing as well.

Alberto Moreiras engages Carl Schmitt. Of crucial importance here is Moreiras’s take on the Schmittian “nomic order,” although its precise terms are not applied here. See “Beyond the Line: On Infinite Decolonization” (580-83). 4 The relation between literature and the state that culminates and declines in the sixties is sustained by a postulation of the nationalpopular as the site of political potential, that is, as the site of the realization of a relation between literature and politics. In fact, without this extension into the domain of the nationalpopular, there is no relation supposed between literature and politics, and thus, for art, no justification for existence vis-à-vis a putatively national-popular state. 5 Maarten van Delden’s formulation puts it well: “Fuentes sketches a narrative in Artemio Cruz in which the revolutionary ideal, betrayed in Mexico, and defeated in Spain, now experiences a new dawn in Cuba […] It is of crucial significance that Fuentes wrote part of Artemio Cruz in Cuba in the year after the Revolution, and that he wants his readers to know this, as we can see from the dates and place names that appear at the close of the text” (60). 6 Jorge Castañeda notes that following the Padilla case (as well as Castro’s support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) “[…] Fuentes never went back [to Cuba] but refused to criticize the Revolution directly […]” (185). From this we might conclude that Fuentes’s now-waning commitment to the revolution finds a spatial articulation traced in his signature. 7 To be sure, the utopian dreams that Cuba allows are not strictly communist dreams. In part, this seems to be central to Fernández Retamar’s critique of Fuentes and might even provide grounds for thinking Cuba’s own ambiguity. 8 The point of reference here is Heberto Padilla’s collection of poems, Fuera del juego (1968), which was found by the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) to be “against” the revolution. His imprisonment aroused suspicions of a perceived Stalinization and provoked significant sectors of the interna-

Works Cited

Alonso, Carlos J. “Writing and Ritual in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.” Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings. Ed. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Alonso Girgado, Luis. Crónica de una muerte anunciada: guía de lectura. A Coruña: Tambre, 1993. Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Bosteels, Bruno. “Theses on Antagonism, Hybridity, and the Subaltern in Latin America.” Latin American Subaltern Studies Revisited. Ed. Gustavo Verdesio. Special Issue of Dispositio/n 25.52 (2005): 147-58.

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Cárdenas, Lázaro. Dust Jacket. La muerte de Artemio Cruz. 1962. Mexico: Fondo de cultura económica, 1973. Castañeda, Jorge. Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War. New York: Vintage, 1994. Castro, Fidel. Palabras a los intelectuales. Montevideo: Comité de intelectuales y artistas de apoyo a la revolución cubana, 1961. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Caliban and Other Essays. Trans. Edward Baker. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2002. Fuentes, Carlos. La muerte de Artemio Cruz. 1962. Mexico: Fondo de cultura económica, 1973. ———. La nueva novela hispanoamericana. 1969. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1997. García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad. 1967. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1983. ———. Crónica de una muerte anunciada. 1981. New York: Vintage Español, 2003. ———. El otoño del patriarca. 1975. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 2001. Jameson, Fredric. “Periodizing the 60s.” The 60s Without Apology. Ed. Sohnya Sayres. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. ———. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

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Larsen, Neil. “The ‘Boom’ Novel and the Cold War in Latin America.” Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P 1995. , Levinson, Brett. The Ends of Literature: The Latin American “Boom” in the Neoliberal Marketplace. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Mejía Duque, Jaime. “El ‘boom’ de la narrativa latinoamericana.” Narrativa y neocoloniaje en América latina. Buenos Aires: Crisis, 1974. Moreiras, Alberto. “Beyond the Line: On Infinite Decolonization.” American Literary History 17.3 (2005): 575-94. ———. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Navarro, Desiderio. “In Media Res Publicas: On Intellectuals and Social Criticism in the Cuban Public Sphere.” Trans. Alessandro Fornazzari and Desiderio Navarro. Nepantla: Views from South 2.2 (2001): 355-71. Padilla, Heberto. Fuera del juego. Buenos Aires: Aditor 1969. Rama, Ángel. “El ‘boom’ en perspectiva.” Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado. Ed. Ángel Rama. Mexico: Marcha, 1981. ———. La narrativa de Gabriel García Márquez: edificación de un arte nacional y popular. Escala: Bogotá, 1991. van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1998.



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