“Chapter 4: The Post-Boom novel” – Philip Swanson
Comps people mentioned:
-
Gabriel
García Márquez, Cien años de soledad
(pg. 85-86)
-
Manuel
Puig, El beso de la mujer araña (pg.
87)
-
Mario
Vargas Llosa, La tía Julia y el
escribidor (pg. 88)
-
Severo
Sarduy, De donde son los cantantes
(pg. 90)
-
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació
la conciencia (pg. 91)
-
Isabel
Allende, La casa de los espíritus
(pg. 94-95)
Figuring out / consolidating some main ideas:
-
Boom
o
Took place in the 1960s
o
Climactic reaction against the traditional
realist and regionalist novel (81)
o
Development of “new novel” (which had been developing
over the years, but came to a head here) (82)
o
“finite burst of commercial activity” –
concentrated publication and sale of many of these “new novels” [in Europe]
(82)
o
Writing style: experimentalism, complexity,
fragmentation, tortuousness, tone of universality (83)
-
Post-Boom
o
Began in the late 1960s / early 1970s
o
Reaction against / movement away from / tweaking
of the Boom’s “new novel” (85)
o
Incorporation of popular/mass culture (85)
o
Increased interest in social/political reality,
the here and now of social/political world (85)
o
More active/visible presence of author (89)
o
Anti-elitist (90)
o
Trend towards readability, structural clarity,
sociopolitical commentary, and relative optimism (94)
General notes:
-
Post-Boom = literary developments from the late
1960s and early 1970s onwards (81)
-
There have been some small shifts to indicate a
transition from the “boom” to the “post-boom” (81)
o
“A number of major novelists associated with the
Boom noticeably develop in a somewhat different direction during and after the
seventies”
o
Sense of a break with the sixties
-
Boom was seen as
climactic reaction against the traditional realist and regionalist novel (81)
o
The “new novel” is associated with the boom (82)
-
The term “post-boom” is hazy (82)
o
Sometimes associated with “postmodernism”
o
Post-boom indicates
a new attitude towards the experimental new novel associated with the Boom –
both a rejection of the New Narrative and a new version of it
o
Post-boom is also associated with the globalization of the Latin American novel
-
The New Novel was an evolving trend since the
1940s or earlier, but the Boom was a “finite burst of commercial activity” (82)
o
The “boom” truly took place in Europe, where
lots of publishing (of Latin American novels) was done
-
Boom literary style
= experimentalism, complexity, fragmentation, tortuousness (83)
-
Boom was ended by events at a major publishing
house and also a major turning point in the Cuban Revolution (83)
o
Turning point: 1971 arrest and humiliation of
the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla – “led to a huge rift between Latin American
writers and shattered the mirage of the unity of the Boom” (84)
-
Cuban revolution was
an important factor in the Boom (83)
o
Cuban revolution made New Novel fashionable,
brought Latin America to international public consciousness (84)
o
Mutual faith of the Latin American writers in
the Cuban revolution – created a sense of unity (84)
-
“the New Novel’s appeal lay precisely in its
shock value… challenging of reader expectations grounded in traditional realism”
(84)
-
Rebellion against “new novel” (post-boom) (85)
o
Return to some form of traditional structures
o
Embracing of / engagement with mass or popular culture
o
Increased orientation towards social or
political reality
o
Two movements:
§
Emergence of new group of writers (including Manuel Puig)
§
Startling change in direction in the work of
already established writers (including Donoso and Vargas
Llosa)
-
“Big Four” of the Boom: Cortázar, Fuentes,
García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa (85)
-
The big writers of the boom were very different
from each other (85)
-
García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad is
indicative of transition from boom to post-boom (85)
o
Radical questioning of the nature of reality and
literature’s ability to describe it (boom)
o
Tone of pessimism (boom)
o
Largely linear narrative framework (post-boom)
o
Deals with an ordinary rural culture in a
down-to-earth way (post-boom)
-
Manuel Puig, El beso de la mujer araña (87)
o
Puig’s most famous, and more explicitly political
novel
o
Incorporation of popular mass culture; both
praises and criticizes it
o
Brief summary
– pg. 87
o
Two protagonists contrast against each other;
one represents “serious” culture and the other represents “popular” culture
o
Focus on sexual message: idea that sexual
repression is at the heart of all repression
o
Problematizes the relationship between fiction
and reality (like a Boom novel in this sense)
-
Mario Vargas Llosa, La tía Julia y el
escribidor, 1977 (88)
o
Demonstrative of his transition from Boom to
post-Boom
o
Autobiographical coming-of-age story
-
In the post-boom literature, “the new technique
of the deliberate foregrounding of authorial machinations actually draws
attention to the fictionality of the text and in so doing emphasizes what was
really the central contention of the New Novel of the Boom: that reality cannot
be faithfully captured by literature” (89)
-
Tension and interplay between Boom and post-Boom
(89)
o
Post-Boom re-worked some of Boom’s main ideas
-
Severo Sarduy, De donde son los
cantantes, 1967 (90-91)
o
Baroque
tone
o
No real narrative in a conventional sense
o
The main characters seek their own meaning, but
meaning is endlessly deferred
o
The plot is “dictated by phonetic associations
or by the internal logic of language itself”
-
The post-Boom isn’t
exactly a complete rejection of the Boom, but rather a new approach to it
(91)
-
Emergence of the testimonio and the New
Historical Novel between the 1970s and 1990s (91)
o
Both reinforce the impression of a greater
emphasis on the direct presentation of social reality
-
Testimonio = “kind of autobiography told by
another, usually more educated and narratively gifted, person” (91)
-
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y
así me nació la conciencia, 1983
(91)
o
Most famous example of a testimonio
o
Provoked many debates about the authenticity of
the “testimonio” genre
o
“while testimonio gives voice to the ordinary or
marginalized people, it risks setting up the same tensions between presentation
and reality that characterized the earlier fiction it seemed to be a reaction
against”
-
New Historical Novel
o
Another obvious attempt to recuperate reality,
particularly by revisiting certain protagonists of the colonial and
independence periods (91)
o
Links history to the unreliability of fiction
-
It’s really difficult to nail down what counts
as post-Boom literature; lots of stuff has been labeled that when it probably
should have been, so it’s not really a reliable/precise term (93-94)
-
Isabel Allende, La casa de los
espíritus, 1982 (94-95)
o
Key work of the Post-Boom
o
Unmistakable reflection of modern Latin American
history, and in particular the modern history of Chile
o
Since it directly reflects modern history, it
comments on the evasive nature of the narrative of the Boom
o
Novel
is a critical reworking of García Márquez’s Cien
años de soledad
o
“Allende’s novel perfectly demonstrates the idea
of the Post-Boom as a rearticulation of the Boom while also exhibiting the
trend towards greater referentiality that some associate with a Post-Boom
proper”
-
Several different ways of understanding the
Post-Boom (95)
-
“sense that ‘young’ Latin American writers still
feel overshadowed by the Boom and still feel a need to respond to it or
challenge it” (96)
-
Mexican “generation del Crack” (97)
-
Post-Boom is “above all a state of mind: a state
of mind in which a sense of newness is conceived in terms of the past as well
as the present and the future” (98)
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