Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

After Macondo: Latin American Literature and the 1960s

Author(s): Samuel Steinberg
Source: Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Vol. 11 (2007), pp. 155-169
Published by: Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
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After Macondo:
Latin American Literature
and the 1960s

Samuel Steinberg is a Como irreversibleproceso de ruptura, la revolution en

Ph.D. candidate in His America latina esta en marcha.

panic Studies at the Uni

versity of Pennsylvania.
He is currently writing
his doctoral dissertation
onMexico, 1968, and the
specters thereof.His work
has appeared in Journal of
Spanish Cultural Studies
and isforthcoming in CR:
New Centennial Review.
JaimeMejia Duque (1974)
It has been extensively noted that the Spanish American
narrative Boom's decline forecasts those of national
popular-centered, emancipatory sequences of the twen
tieth century.Whether or deserved, the
gratuitous 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 Ameri
canist 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 Ameri
can literature both culminates and enters itsdefinitive crisis
with the Boom. In perhaps themost
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 and yet, the Boom also
reading public,
represents a point of entry to the transnational field, which
a secret to the
implies kind of telling of the Latin American
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 trendswith respect to the

Arizona Journal ofHispanic Cultural Studies Volume 11, 2007

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 156 Arizona Journal ofHispanic Cultural Studies

social insertion of culture. Latin American an

Mejia Duque, ideological and political
literatures far beyond Latin
circulation ambiguity?entails that the Boom is not
America forms both an entry of literature as itselfcapable of "overcoming" this ambigu
well as Latin American difference?because which constitutes a strangely "successful"
ity,
the latterwas both internationally consti exteriorization of the Cuban Revolution in
tuted as well as locally sutured through spite of not only thewaning of the Booms
literature?intothe market. Along these commitment to that revolution, but also,
lines we might understand the sense in more
generally, its failure
to secure its own
which the Boom maintains two contradic stake in the Latin American social field, de

tory alliances: one to the national-popular/ a

spite (as result of) its
own social force (that
to a transnational fact that itappears in this revo
planning state, the other is,despite the

literarymarket. Following this symptomatic lutionary atmosphere). Yet, as I hope to show,

appearance of the Boom, what remains for
literature and literary theory is a reflection
upon what the literary can still accomplish
and under what termsmight it secure the
future of its own social being, ifat all.
I take as a point of departure an essay
written by Colombian critic Jaime Mejia
we can still retrace a
specific and resonant
opening to the overcoming of this ambigu
ity 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
itsgesture of literaryself-cancellation, which

Duque, "El 'Boom' de la narrativa latino forms its retreat from the possibility of its
americana," published in 1974. From a social insertion, a retreat that simultaneously

perspective thatNeil Larsen has described claims the only possible literarypolitics. To
as (69), Mejia understand closure as the task of the literary
"revolutionary-historicist"
Duque addresses what he refers to as its is to posit the Booms "deconstructive" mo
ment as itspolitical promise, as
"constitutive
ambiguity:" precisely that
moment inwhich it ismost "internal" to the
Cuban Revolution.
Tambien alienta ahi la razon profun

la 'razon de que
Iwill consider the Boom's vicissitudes
da, historical para
la conciencia en America here by reflecting upon threemoments of
general
Latina tanto como en
Europa y aun particular intensity,which taken together,
m?s alia, el 'boom'?fenomeno par
offer a kind of narrative sketch for the con
ticularmente
capitalista?apareciera ception of literature and emancipatory poli
funcionando en una articulation viva tics in sixties-era Latin America forwhich
y agitacional con la revolution. I am arguing. Thus, the first section reads
Esto es lo que denominamos la Fidel Castro's 1961 Palabras a los intelectu
constitutiva del 'boom.'
ambig?edad alesy a programmatic political and aesthetic
Precisamente ser eso?constitu
statement that to some art
degree orients
por
tiva?no era
superable por el 'boom' and politics for the decade to come. The
mismo. (133)
second and third sections of this article,
in turn, engage perhaps the most widely

Mejia Duque provides themilitant version read and relevant of Boom authors, Car
of areading of the Boom which has become los Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia M?rquez,
more or less canonical.1 As note
registered here, keeping Castro's program inmind. I
the constitutive nature of this tension?for from the outset, however, that this argu

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Samuel Steinberg 157
ment does not commence a
"reading" of
Boom texts in the way one might expect.
Rather, I mean to develop an understand
a as
ing of the Boom and its place within
genealogy of the decline of the project of
the leftas 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.
i
The 1961 text Palabras a los intelec
tuales, inwhich Fidel Castro offers a pro
on culture and
grammatic address politics
to an assembly of intellectuals, provides an
status of
early diagnosis of the ambiguous
literature aswell 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 theCuban 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 intel
lectual 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
as a mode
centrality this text grants culture
of articulating and dividing this space is
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notable. The formulation he employs pecu
liarly invokes an antinomy between inside
and outside that has served, among other
uses, the thought-image for today's capi
talism. In the conceptualization offered,we
encounter a curious, if imprecise duplica
tion ormirror image of capital space. Castro
asks (or wonders aloud): "^Cuales son los
derechos de los escritores y de los artistas
revolucionarios o no revolutionaries?" He
answers: "Dentro de la Revolution:
todo;
contra la Revolution: ning?n derecho
(APLAUSOS)" (2).2
The suggestion of an "inside" to the
revolution creates the expectation of an
"outside," which isnot referencedhere. In its
we find, rather, "dentro" s uncommon
place
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, theymust all remain
"inside" the revolution. There isno leaving,
there is no outside. What remains is a posi
tion "against" revolution, which thewriter
or artist is now always already within. This
or
position "against"must thus be futile fun
circumscribed as it isby
damentally obscure,
the removal or cancellation of rights, indeed
of all rights, for there can be only "every
to intellectuals
right" and "no right" granted
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." Itmust 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:

[...] ends up penetrating and
zing thoseveryprecapitalist enclaves
(Nature and theUnconscious) which
offered extraterritorial and Archime
dean footholds forcriticaleffectivity.
(Postmodernism49)
Castro s failure to name thatwhich
of revolution underlines the prescient nature
of his intervention, forwe may well deduce
that Castro has recognized the key features
of late capitalism just as these transforma
tions were underway. As Jameson notes in
a text a few years earlier,
published
Late capitalism can [...] be described
as the moment in which the last
vestiges of Nature which survived
on into classical
capitalism
length eliminated: namely the third
world and theunconscious. The 60s
will thenhave been themomentous
transformational period in which
this systematic restructuring
place on a global scale. ("Periodizing
the Sixties" 207)
Faced, then, with the intense expan
sion of late capital that the sixties inau
gurates, Castro postulates an alternative,
prescriptive spatiality for the revolution
that contests capitalism byway 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 "ex
traterritorial enclaves," a task, according to
Jameson, that commences globally in the
sixties, is resolved inCastro'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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158 Arizona Journal ofHispanic Cultural Studies
coloni 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
isoutside
workers will betray or will support revolu
tion only obtains in the first
place for those
artists and intellectuals in a place of inde
cision. Revolutionary writers and artists,
to Castro,
know precisely their
according
responsibility and will always actwith fidel
to revolution.
ity 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 final
are at ly,a persistent symbolic presence of an order
outside revolution (that is,ofCuba'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
takes 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 to thus be treated as an absolute
right,
enemy (unless, of course, that enemy iswill
ing 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 revolutionaries" (8).
This field of indecision, however, must also
be liquidated, not necessarily by force, but
as a result of the process
by
means ofwhich
"[...] esa Revolution econ?mica y social
tiene que producir inevitablemente tambien
una Revolution cultural [...]" (4). Put in
other terms, this realm of indecision must
be transformed by revolution into a much
more matter.
unambiguous
 Samuel Steinberg 159

If capitalism proposed to eliminate its II

opposite (socialism) and conquer itsexterior, In what must appear today like a
and once provided the grounds for thinking blatent example of the appropriation of
theworld on such terms,we must consider intellectual and cultural work by the state
the exterior of a putatively Marxist-Leninist
(or rather, by a certain conception of the
space.What is visible to the revolution as
state), I cite Lazaro Cardenass note of ap
the possible outside to revolution? On the
proval for Carlos Fuentess La muerte de
one hand, both "outside" and we Artemio Cruz. Arguably theMexican presi
"against,"
find theAlliance for Progress, transnational dent most "faithful" to the principles of the
capital, and Yankee imperialism, but on the Mexican Revolution, here, some years after
other, "outside," and not "against," in the his presidency, and in light of a perceived
space of "constitutive ambiguity," remains degeneration of theMexican Revolution,
the narrative Boom, which is caught in a he provides the coordinates for
inscribing
strange zone of indecision as an exterior Fuentes's into revolutionary his
novel
cultural form that sympathizes with the a faithful
tory?into revolutionary history.
revolution, which is inspired by the revo The ex-president writes:
lution, but which is not completely of the
revolution. The social presence of the Boom Gracias por el envio de su novela
thus announces both the extensive symbolic m?s reciente,La muerte de Artemio
success of the revolution, aswell as its effec Cruz, la que he leido con elmismo
tive insularity.As Mejfa Duque asserts: interes que las anteriores, encontran

do en esta tambien una profunda

interpretation de los sentimientos
Aunque producido en el contexto y de la actividad ante de los seres
cultural y politico creado por la se desenvuelven en los distintos
que
revolution cubana, y en tal sentido
medios que usted describe en sus
indirectamente subsidiario de ella, novelas con tantafidelidad.Adem?s
el 'boom' no era ni hubiera podido
de sus reconocidas cualidades como
ser hecho interno de esta revolution
escritor, me parece que la fuerza de
[...]. (138) sus novelas reside en la intention

revolucionaria que proyectan unida

la fina sensibilidad del intelectual
By turning now to Carlos Fuentes's La
estrechamente ligado a la vida de
muerte de Artemio Cruz, we will see a
su pueblo y la inquietud del joven
rather clear polemic around how a particular
escritor busca una nueva
que y vi
Boom novel locates itself/is located within
gorosa tecnica literaria. Esperamos
revolution. More precisely, I will argue con interes creciente sus nuevas obras
that this novel exemplifies both the use of literarias hacen honor aMexico,
que
the literaryobject for the reconstitution of aqui y en el extranjero. (n.p.)
the national-popular in the name of the
Mexican Revolution?a certain Mexican Here again, the Boom novel resides at
Revolution, in any case?as well as the this intersection between its international
novels use of the Cuban Revolution as an extension and the con
national-popular,
extraterritorial zone of Utopian fantasy and a form and content.4
veying revolutionary
cultural-political self-authorization. Fuentes is said to honor Mexico at home

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 160 Arizona Journal ofHispanic Cultural Studies

and abroad by presenting the image of author's commercial success, his stardom,

revolution to both international as well as undermines his possible solidarity with

national reading publics. Fuentes's text, ac something like the common destiny of
to Cardenas, demonstrates his link the popular, a solidarity which the Cuban
cording
to theMexican
people. Significantly, the Revolution (and not the Boom) commands
on the back cover of an to a
quotation appears regionally and articulates global public
editionpublishedby theFondo de cultura (122). He continues:
econ?mica, for their "coleccion popular."
Cardenas thus authorizes, even sanctifies, El escritor del "boom" llega a ser,
this relation between the national-popu desde la plataforma de un mercado
en un nom
lar, the writer, the transnational field, and expansion vertiginosa,
bre que vale si solo, un ente
por
finally, emancipatory politics, all of which metafisico imbuido de esa deidad:
is reiterated in the collections mission state
Una firma. (122)
ment, which also appears on the novels back
cover. It reads:
Reading Mejia Duque strongly, itwould
appear that rather than the emergence of a
La COLECCION POPULAR
un esfuerzo editorial?y singular artisticmastery, the Boom signifies
significa the exact opposite. This signature appears on
difundir entre n?cleos
social?para editorial contracts and presages the gradual
m?s amplios de lectores,de acuerdo
professionalization and self-commodifica
con normas de calidad cultural y en
tion of the author. The signature also finds
librosde precio accesible y presenta
tion sencilla pero digna, lasmoder itsway onto the novels themselves, frequent
aura of
nas creaciones literarias de nuestro ly inscribing the place, of the local,
idioma, los aspectos mas
importantes byway of referring the novel constantly to a
del pensamiento contempor?neo y concrete historical situation. It is thusworth
inwhich Fuentes s
reflecting upon theway
las obras de interes fundamental para
nuestra America,
(n.p.) La muerte de Artemio Cruz inscribes both
authorial professionalization (signature-as
By now the novel begins
to form a museum contract; name/book-as-commodity) aswell
of a relation between literature and the as an
incomplete solidarity with theCuban
national-popular. Already noteworthy is Revolution (signature-within-revolution).
the extent to which the national publish Fuentes's novel closes with a rather
at to contain Fuentes s conventional form of authorial
ing industry is pains signature:
text, to resignify it, to produce its com "La Habana, mayo de I960 /Mexico,
mensurability with the emancipation of the diciembre de 1961" (316). As the common
(both inMexico, as well place goes, in Fuentes's moment, Havana
national-popular
as in "our America"). assumes the status of the site fromwhich a
on the contrary, asserts critical evaluation of theMexican Revolution
Mejia Duque,
that the Boom's potentials for promoting might be ventured.5 Itmight also be said that
are the route the signature evokes?from revo
regional emancipation largely blocked
lutionary Havana toMexico City?might
by the extent to which the Boom reflects
a "commercial an also serve as an own
enterprise," rather than allegory of the author's
as an
aesthetic movement. In other words, the ideological posture, that is, allegory

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Samuel Steinberg 161

of his journey from revolution back home, ramifications of the Padilla affair seem most
from "inside" revolution and back to its decisive for Caliban, for itwas then that
not
"outside."6 More forcefully, itwould many of the Booms writers reevaluated their
merely be a of to suggest that the relationship to the Cuban Revolution.8
flight fancy
otherwise customary and unremarkable in The polemical text finally and deci

scription of place with which Fuentes closes sively separates friends and allies (of the
his novel in this case implies an assertion of revolution) from its enemies. Fernandez
the revolutionary "every right" that Castro Retamar collects the former beneath the

promises, which might well be understood sign of Caliban. Among many others, the
as Fuentes's as diverse as
"every right" to appropriate gathering includes comrades
the revolution as image-space as a means Zapata, Castro, Arguedas, and Fanon, all of
of dramatically and heroically launching his whom share the culture of Caliban, which
name?linked to on will become themark of the insular, the lo
popular emancipation
various fronts?into a transnational literary cal, theminor, and, thus, the possibilities of
world. That is,while the market secures liberation. Fernandez Retamar passionately
distribution and proliferation, "revolu asks, "[...] what is our culture, if not the
tion" (and more generally, evocation of the history and culture of Caliban?" (14). At
"local") assures marketability to a world in a time when
revolutionary hopes were on
which revolution was on themove, to recall the verge of a global letdown, Calib?n/Cuba
theMejia Duque quotation that serves asmy would stand as the continued possibility of
serve the a Utopian,
epigraph. Cuba and its revolution revolutionary enclave?as the
Boom as a center of regional pride and in as the space
place of difference itself?even
ternational curiosity, just as Cuba continues of that Utopia seemed to succumb evermore
to serve, as to internal and external to both
adopting Jameson's vocabulary, aggressions,
an extraterritorial foothold for a reason still counterrevolution as well as its own per
or contrary to ceived repressiveness. To be sure, one does
putatively external capital's
not find listed here the treacherous fellow
purview and which keeps Utopian dreams
alive.7 It is in this sense thatCuba becomes travelers of the Boom, like Fuentes, much
a further instrument less constant enemies, like literarycritic and
through which the
writer authorizes his project and sends it "servant of imperialism" Emir Rodriguez
into themarketplace. Monegal (14). In thisway, the text divides
While Fuentes'sinscription projects Caliban from the enemy, the popular from
the CubanRevolution, it also protects it the
hegemonic,
Mam's "Nuestra America"

and commands its insularity. Such appears from Sarmiento's Facundo. Caliban centers
to be the critique of the Boom mounted by on the as the site
staging of cultural politics
Roberto Fernandez Retamar inhis canonical of a political struggle for liberation, taking
Caliban. Fernandez Retamar's text already the Boom's substitution of aesthetics for
to a to its limit.9 Fernandez Retamar's
begins register the limitations of kind of politics
returns to literary an
self-evident and self-policing revolutionary essay thus history in
space by speaking of culture in terms that attempt to reorganize it around questions
recognize the isolation of the revolutionary of militancy and commitment, around

project: the essay appears

now as a kind of the new mode of reading required under
noble last stand for a reconceptualization of revolutionary dispensation. Accordingly,
a culture of revolution. In this context, the Facundo is to be rejected as a violent and

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 162 Arizona Journal ofHispanic Cultural Studies

content:
subalternizing representation ofArgentina, ideological through Marxism-Le
while Marti is to be celebrated as an alterna ninism, the revolution declares not only its
tive, as a possible inversion or overturning political project, but also
more
importantly
of such a literary model. Through these its very being. Until thismoment itmust

paradigmatic past texts,Fernandez Retamar be assumed that the revolution ismerely

a vague an open, unnamed oc
projects the cultural field of future politi upheaval,
cal struggle,which is to be waged, in part, currence for all who, like Fuentes, would

against the authority that both traitors and
enemies consolidated for themselves during
the Boom era.
Fernandez Retamar strikes out with
as we
particular fury against Fuentes, who,
have seen, began a Boom novel, La muerte de
Artemio Cruz, according to the authorial sig
nature at its conclusion, inHavana inMay
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 disin
genuously falsifies his leftistcredentials in a
bid to secure his place in lettersas ameans of
claim itfor themselves. The Marxist-Lenin
ist declaration serves as yet another crucial
separation. After this revolution within the
revolution, to borrow a phrase from Regis
Debray, those who would seek to authorize
themselves in the revolutions name begin
to feel not a little discomfort, which is
only amplifiedby Padillas show trialand
imprisonment, here referred towith almost
humorous understatement as "a Cuban
writer's month in
jail."
While from a certain
perspective
Fernandez Retamar merely takes Fuentes
to task
regarding his less than revolution
ary politics, the vehemence of this debate,
the violence with which Fuentes must be

compensating forhis apparent lack of talent. denounced suggests more. As Brett Levin
As Fernandez Retamar continues, he speaks son writes:

of a "Mexican mafia," ofwhich Fuentes is a

The debate whether the Boom is
standing member:
radical or conservative, an interven

This group warmly expressed its tion into the market or a movement

that plays to the market [...] misses

sympathyfor theCuban Revolution
a key point. The Boom stamps the
until, in 1961, the revolution pro
claimed itselfand proved tobeMarx convergence of these opposites.
ist-Leninist?that is, a revolution that In the Boom, the reactionary and
has in its forefront the radical of literature are
components
worker-peasant
alliance. From that day not as one but as coinci
on, the sup exposed
dental. (23)
port of themafia grew increasingly
diluted up to the last fewmonths

when?taking advantage of thewild By way of exploiting his position "out

vociferation occasioned by a Cuban side" and not "against," finally becoming a
writer'smonth in jail?they broke figure that collapses this distinction (or that
obstreperouslywith Cuba. (30) marks the point of itsconvergence), Fuentes
renders legible the need to impose a line
It would seem that the revolution between friends and enemies as increasingly
only
arrives, for Fernandez Retamar, after the an instrumental necessity for a certainmode
decisive declaration of itsMarxist-Leninist of thought to continue. This debate, in other

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Samuel Steinberg 163

words, is a fake that distracts those who to lose itself in themoment of itsgreatness.
wage it from the future towhichliterature The above would suggest that if the Boom
and politics will both submit, a future that today appears as a fallenmovement, a failure,
is symptomatically made present in both the it is perhaps because we have not yet
fully
Boom as well as theCuban Revolution. the transitional drive it
By recognized epochal,
way of understanding this future?our pres had. That is, if its ability to finalize, to give
ent?we look now to a moment inwhich end, to blow itselfup, iswhat theBoom now
literature faces the future by imposing its commemorates, this self-cancellation might
own closure to the social world inwhich it stand as its apology to a politics of libera
circulated and grounded its legitimacy. tion and to the revolutionary sequences of
the sixties. It seems possible, after all, that a

in dominant feature of the Boom was not the

mediation of a profoundly conflicted Latin
If the Boom's decline is a constant, ifat American modernity, but rather, a work
times unintentional, invention of the Boom ing out of those conflicts as the very limit
itselfas a political commitment, then perhaps of literature's political potential. I would
the Boom isnot lost after a failed attempt at like to suggest, in short, that rather than
some kind of
mediating global and local, market and cul appropriating instrument to
ture, the revolution and liberal democracy. be supplanted, as critics such as Fernandez
Rather theBoom is itselfa calling into being Retamar have proposed, theBoom is already
of itsown failure as a pseudo-ethical act, or Latin American literature s desire for nega
rather a commitment. With the Boom Latin tion, itsdesire to dissolve literature's consti
American literatureeventually denies itselfas tutively treacherous socio-political presence.
political form in order to protect the future As Brett Levinson forcefully notes:
an
of emancipatory politics, in effect, in
order to cancel the substitution of aesthetics When we cannot distinguish 'litera
ture as intervention from 'literature
for politics, for ifLatin American literature
as when aesthetic
becomes subject to the transnational market conservation,'
innovation, revolt, disturbance, and
during the Boom, then the autonomy of difference entrances into
represent
state is simultaneously threatened
planning the market, into the Same, literature
by transnational forces. It is through this ceases both to sustainand
disrupt the
fact thatwe might understand both Castro's social dichotomies upon which the
and Fernandez Retamar's cultural critique as
globe banks and thus concludes its
well as their attempts to distance theCuban modern function. (28)
Revolution and emancipatory politics in
from certain cultural forms. Yet the The Boom's
general self-negation thus hinges upon
Boom is outside of revolution. As we have itsown epiphanic realization (amoment of
seen, revolution cannot definitively stamp realization, indeed, that follows the aesthetic
out thatwhich lives beyond the reach of its norms of the Boom novels themselves) that
insular order. it has been complicit in the dissolution of
For this reason, self-cancellation is the imagined wall of separation between
uniquely the power of the Boom and its market functions and rebellion, that it
only remaining power as an emancipatory provides certain grounds for indecision in
politics. Indeed, itenacts this power in a bid revolutionary times.

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 164 Arizona Journal ofHispanic Cultural Studies

As I note above, Angel Rama offers the escrito en ellos era irrepetibledesde
anos desoledad?accord siemprey para siempreporque todas
publication ofGen
tomany definitions the culmination of las estirpes condenadas a cien anos de
ing
no tenian una
the Boom at itsmost widely intelligiblemo soledad
segunda opor

ment?as a moment of its closure tunidad sobre la tierra. (448-49)

possible
("El 'boom'" 85-86). This isnot only true in
the sense thatGen anos de soledad'became so one who has
Against the better judgment of
a
it
genre-defining that closed the very
mean pretensions of speaking as critic and not
as a fan, I am to concede to Gar
ing of the Boom. Nor is itmerely that the tempted
novel's extensive international circulation cia the lastword. As Jean Franco
M?rquez
and continued popularity have functioned reminds us, "Garcia Marquez's Macondo
as a reductive emblem for the whole of to be mentioned for to
only needed people
Latin American culture. It seems also that understand that itwas a fantasy of a liber
the novel itself ends in a kind of prescrip ated territory" (7). In this sense, the text
tive cancellation of writing, conceived as evokes Cuba's insular liberation and the
a mode of a liberated kind of literary imaginary that necessarily
bringing into being
Latin American modernity. Itwould seem sustains such liberations. Carlos Fuentes's
thatGarcia M?rquez ends his great book by characterization of the textmakes evenmore

learning the lesson of the sixties. The book explicit the relation between literature and
does not mark a failure, but an apprentice Utopian thought/practice. Fuentes writes,
"La fundaci?n de Macondo es la fundaci?n
ship in the problematic linking of literature
to the
political. As the readerwill remember,
de Utopia [...]. Como laUtopia de Moro,
the text concludes in its own erasure: Macondo es una isla de la
imagination" (La
nueva novela 60). However, this
imagined
Utopia, this liberated island, is organized by
Macondo era ya un pavoroso re

molino de y escombros cen itsown undoing. In this literarycancellation

polvo

trifugadopor la colera del hurac?n resides the rhetorical?but not necessarily

biblico, cuando Aureliano salto once
effective?cancellation of the ambiguous
no el
paginas para perder tiempo two enemy
frontier dividing spatio-politi
en hechos demasiado conocidos,
cal orders.
a descifrar el instante en
y empezo
a
den anos de soledad suggests, in other
que estaba viviendo, descifrandolo

medida que lo vivia, profetiz?ndose words, the taking root of an alteration in

a simismo en el acto de descifrar la literature's social insertion between the
ultima pagina de los pergaminos, national-popular and transnational market,
como si se estuviera viendo en un which perhaps might be best understood as
espejo hablado [...]. Sin embargo, a kind of decision to no
longer reproduce
antes de llegaral verso final ya habfa the national-popular or work for its eman
no saldrfa jamas
comprendido que anos de soledad is,
ese
cipation inwriting. Cien
de cuarto, pues estaba previsto in other words, a book between literature's
que la ciudad de los espejos (o los to the national-popular
commitment and
espejismos) seria arrasada por el
the planning state and thatwhich succeeds
viento y desterrada de la memoria

de los hombres en el instante en it. It is, in this sense, not the high point of
this relation, but the sign of its cancellation.
que Aureliano Babilonia acabara de
descifrar los pergaminos, y todo lo We may wish to understand Macondo, the

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Samuel Steinberg 165

cen
peculiar spatial enclave that appears [e]nfrentamiento de materiales que
as the
trally inden anos de soledad,
se a si mismos,
product destruyen y que,
of the author s prescience, as a thinking of simultaneamente, generan la posi

what must come afterMacondo. Macondo bilidad de unas formas superiores

is the point of degeneration of the Utopian, de las cuales emerja la linea interna
va desarrollando la
zigzagueante que
the self-realized futility of phantasmatic
cultura. (30)
insular liberations, whether forwarded by
or the state. Garcia text
writing M?rquez's
registers
most ambivalently the vicissitudes Perhaps what Rama observes here is the
of Utopian regional
or local
thinking in expression of Garcia Marquez's willing
the moment inclusion in the insular revo
precisely during which the conceptual
nation-state/literature seemed to be losing lutionary order. His novel thematizes the
as a destruction of writing as a submission to
ground primary organ of hegemonic
articulation, yet when the perceived fulfill Castro's programmatic statement bymeans
ment of the or transnational field ofwhich, as I cite above, "[...] esa Revolu
global
had not yet forged other, alternative modes tion economica y social tiene que producir
of representing a given social field. In other inevitablemente tambien una Revolution
words, he writes this novel in themidst of a cultural [...]" (4). Macondo's dissolution
kind of literarydecay, but before anything thus represents an advance for thought
had arrived to replace (or displace) the and politics, figuring the symbolic-effective
as such testimonio, cultural extension of the Cuban Revolution, not in
literary (say,
studies, new media, and so on). Suffice it the obscure fashion inwhich "opportunists"
to say,written as a kind of midwife text have made itcirculate, but rather as a power
for the transition towards a new epoch, the over
writing.
novel closes the literature-emancipatory I take this chance to refermy argu
alliance that characterizes much of ment to one made by Alberto Moreiras in
politics
to
Latin Americas literarymodernity. As Angel his Exhaustion ofDifference with respect
Rama writes: Jose Maria Arguedas's suicide, which he
casts as both literary-symbolic as well as
Cuando en el ano sesenta y siete la actual-effective. "With Arguedas's literary
publication de den anos de soledad act," he writes, "Latin American founda
cierra un determinado de la
perfodo tional utopianism comes to its end" (207).
obra de Garcia tambien
Marquez, It is here that literature closes itself off
corona un comienza a
proyecto que from its power to mediate and resolve the
esbozarse y a plantearse a fines de la
social conflicts characteristic of the Latin
decada del cuarenta; ese
y proyecto,
en varios textos
American nation-states; literature loses?in
que initiales de Gar

cia comienza a delinearse, this "literary act"?its power and raz?n de

Marquez
es el de una ser.Macondo's dissolution, going further,
justamente representar
literaturanational y popular. (Edi marks literature's cancellation of literature

fication30) as a commitment to revolutionary

precisely
Utopias, founded in the collective social
This novel culminates a project because, for subject that
once answered to the name of
Rama, it represents a dialectical advance, the national-popular.Such desires can only
understood as the: be achieved, afterGarcia Marquez's literary

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 166 Arizona Journal ofHispanic Cultural Studies

act, through a revolutionary politics proper turns on the repetition ofMacondo's dis

(again,
over
against the historical alliance solution, which in turn poses a challenge
literature-state). The text seems, as Bruno to any expectation of Macondo's eventual
Bosteels has put it, programmatically, to redemption. This very repetition suggests
"unsuture art and politics" (158). the way in which the spectral continuity
erasure of Macondo, a of literature is literature's bid to constantly
Through the
unsutur In this sense, the Boom
figure for the Utopian enclave, this void redemption.
commences. The novel foresees the loss of continues as its own constant self-cancel
ing
the potential of all such liberated territoriesin lation. Macondo's dissolution, which, as I
note above, at some point seemed to aver a
writing, that is, the loss of obscure imaginary
liberated territories.Through the reading act radical rupture, is by the time of Cronica de
the potential of imagined liberated territory una muerte anunciada, a ritual that saturates

dissolves, is cancelled and dispersed in the the text.This now ritualistic literarycancella
air; itdisappears, and we are yet condemned tion, in effect,presents itselfas the only way
for betraying revolution by believing that of grounding thewriting task and allowing
our liberation could ever have been read. it to continue afterMacondo. If Garcia
The text thus not only stands as a statement M?rquez rather melodramatically sweeps
on the fallen status of the inwhat be themore
political and social away Macondo might
insertion of the writer's intervention, but celebrated self-imposed literarycancellation,
more
strongly, brings this fallen status into Cronica de una muerte anunciada reiterates
act of liter this closure. Cronica de una muerte anun
being. A re-appropriation of this
ary-utopian self-cancellation might
rescue ciada produces itsown death as a comment
us yet from a static relation to literature as on its own as a failed as a
writing project,
a to but in this case
contingency of themarket, emancipa dying labor, formally, and
tory politics as a failed project. Macondo's thus, generically. This double cancellation, it
dissolution marks a closure of literature and isworth repeating, represents the emergence

revolutionary-utopian politics, but it is also for literature of a new raz?n de (no) ser fol
an to be seen, even
opening. What remains lowing the termination of the political forms
a to
today, iswhether that opening is call of social integration and emancipation that

forgiveness between literature and revolu previously had organized and legitimated the
tion, or instead, a chance to cut our losses by Latin American literary task.11
a Carlos J. Alonso begins his conclu
forging differentpolitics beyond the reaches
of literature, a politics that resides neither in sions on Cronica de una muerte anunciada
the domain of culture, nor in its negation, text seems to comment
by noting how the
and always without literature's redemption. on the very failure of thewriting task. He
Unlike Arguedas, Garcia Marquez lives on writes:

and must commit to repetition.

The community figured in Garcia
Writing, the suggestion appears to
M?rquez's later novel, Cr?nica de una cannot serve as the instrument
be,
muerte a structural
anunciada, possesses for redemption and cleansing that
similarity toMacondo, and not only with the novel envisions, since it is itself
respect
to its status as territorial enclave.10 constituted and sustained througha
to sug
By way of concluding, Iwould like
violence that traverses it to the very

that Cr?nica de una muerte anunciada core. (162)

gest

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Samuel Steinberg 167

Alonso argues that the text itself isorganized of that cancellation.

or own reflection on writing
reigned by its A widely known anecdote holds that
as a "instrument for redemption Garcia M?rquez forswore writing another
possible
and cleansing" (162), a redemption, one novel as as
long Pinochet held power inChile.
should add, no longer offered through the Only
one novel, Elotono
delpatriarca, stands
national-popular and the planning state between thewriting ofden anos de soledad
whose desire the novel once promised to and Cronica de una muerte anunciada. Yet,

embody or inspire. This writing thus alle
to put it in other terms, literature's
gorizes,
own decline as an instrument
through
which the national-popular might emerge
and the planning state might effectively
text can protect
imagine social justice. The
neither the Latin American
own
appearance
as literature and thus effaces its
textuality.
This knowledge [...] also appears to
be incorporated into the novel as a
to eradicate
persistent attempt
structureof differencesonwhich the
textisconstructed. Seen in this
light,
Chronicle ofa Death Foretold seems to
be foreveron the verge of reverting
to a state of undifferentiation
would jeopardize the systemof dif
ferences that rules the text. (162)
Cronica 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 literarycancellation wit
nessed by Garcia Marquez's return to form.
secret, nor its From the perspective of literature?after
the Boom, afterMacondo?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
Notes
1
As Larsen notes, scholars such as Gerald
Martin share thisunderstanding of theBoom as
that being "overdetermined"by theCuban Revolution
and the atmosphere it created (70). In Larsen's
excellent essay, he this
regards "revolutionary
historicist" critical optic as the one that "[...]

The erasure that Alonso observes in the text, brings us closest to the complex truth of the
which is effected in distinct and diverse phenomenon itself" (70), at least compared
towhat he calls the "aestheticist"approach of
manners but particularly through simi
the Boom authors themselves or the
vulgar
larities between characters' names, finally in
sociological standpoint" adopted by Rama
evinces its own "[...] violent essence, dem the essay "El 'boom' en It isworth
perspectiva."
onstrating that itmust speak the contradic noting thatbothMejia Duque aswell as Rama
toryknowledge that it embodies even at the appear in the present essay as symptoms of what

expense of itsown unmaking" (163). Along names, in a gloss onHalperin

the lines of Cien anos de soledad, Cr?nica de
una muerte anunciada cancels itselfby 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 anos de soledad, but rather
as the
hope of continuing the verymeaning
Larsen insightfully
Donghi, the "seeming right/left aphasia of the
'boom'"
(72).
2
For an excellent reading of this speech, see
Desiderio Navarro's "InMedia Res Publicas: On
Intellectuals and Social Criticism in theCuban
Public Sphere."Here I take the chance to thank
him for alertingme to thispassage.
3
My understanding of the friend/enemy
divide as a key dimension of the political is
informed,above all, by a seriesof texts inwhich

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 168 Arizona Journal ofHispanic Cultural Studies

Alberto Moreiras engages Carl Schmitt. Of tional leftto sever tieswith Cuba.
9
crucial importance
here isMoreiras's take on the The point of reference here is Idelber
Schmittian "nomic order," although itsprecise Avelar, who has arguedmost clearly thatBoom
terms are not here. See the narrative exerted like a compensa
applied "Beyond something
Line: On InfiniteDecolonization" (580-83). tory function for the uneven or
incomplete
4
The relation between literatureand the modernization of Latin America, a
compensa
state that culminates and declines in the sixties tory function that produced not merely the
is sustained by a postulation of the national aestheticization of politics but the "substitution
popular as the site of political potential, that of aesthetics forpolitics" (11).
10
is, as the site of the realization of a relation I will briefly recall the novel. The text's
between literatureand politics. In fact,without central event is the murder of
Santiago
Nasar.

this extension into the domain of the national Because we know who killed him and how, the
no relation supposed between
popular, there is narrator's curious search for the truth revolves

literature and politics, and thus, for art, no around a differentquestion. The purportedly
for existence vis-?-vis a central secret?whether Nasar
justification putatively Santiago truly

national-popular
state. went to bed with Angela Vicario (hismurderers'
5
Maarten van Delden's formulation it sister)?is never resolved.
puts
11
well: "Fuentes sketches a narrative in Artemio Cronica de una muerte anunciada repeats
Cruz inwhich the revolutionary ideal, betrayed Cien anos de soledad in otherways as well. The
inMexico, and defeated in now of the character Mercedes Barcha,
Spain, experi duplication
ences a new dawn in Cuba [...] It is of crucial future wife of the narrator/Garcia
M?rquez,

significance that Fuentes wrote part ofArtemio in both texts, of which Luis Alonso Girgado
Cruz inCuba in the year after theRevolution, reminds us (63), suggestsfurtherthe continuity
and that he wants his readers to know this, as between the two narratives. More notable is the
we can see from the dates and names that of the name Aureliano Buendia, as not
place repetition
appear at the close of the text" (60). only
an intertextual function but as a marker
6
JorgeCastaneda notes that following the of something like a time lapse between the two
Padilla case (aswell as Castro's support for the texts' writing as well.

Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) "[...] Fuentes

neverwent back [toCuba] but refused to criti Works Cited
cize theRevolution directly [...]" (185). From Alonso, Carlos J. "Writingand Ritual inChron
this we
might
conclude that Fuentes's now-wan icle of a Death Foretold." Gabriel Garcia
ingcommitment to the revolutionfinds a spatial Mdrquez:
New
Readings.
Ed. Bernard Mc
articulation traced in his Guirk and Richard Cardwell. Cambridge:
signature.
7
To be sure, the Utopian dreams thatCuba
Cambridge UP, 1987.
allows are not communist dreams. In Alonso Luis. Cronica una muerte
strictly de
Girgado,
this seems to be central to Fernandez anunciada: de A
part, lectura. Coruna:
guia
Retamar's of Fuentes and even
critique might Tambre, 1993.
provide grounds for thinkingCuba's own am Avelar, Idelber.TheUntimelyPresent:Postdictato
biguity. rial Latin American Fiction and theTask of
8
The point of referencehere isHeberto
Mourning. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
Padillas collection of poems, Fuera del juego Bosteels, Bruno. "Theses on
Antagonism,
(1968), which was found by the Union de Hybridity, and the Subaltern in Latin
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America." Latin American Subaltern Studies
the revolution. His
"against" imprisonment
Revisited. Ed. Gustavo Verdesio. Is
aroused of a Stalinization Special
suspicions perceived sue ofDispositioln 25.52 (2005): 147-58.
and provoked significantsectorsof the interna

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