Writing Revolution in Latin America , livre ebook

Writing Revolution in Latin America
Writing Revolution in Latin America
From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño
Juan E. De Castro
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville
© 2019 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2019
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: De Castro, Juan E., 1959- author.
Title: Writing revolution in Latin America : from Marti to Garcia Marquez to Bolano / Juan De Castro.
Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019010305 (print) | LCCN 2019020238 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826522603 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826522580 | ISBN 9780826522580 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780826522597 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780826522603 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Latin American fiction--20th century--History and criticism. | Revolutionary literature, Latin American--History and criticism. | Revolutions in literature.
Classification: LCC PQ7082.N7 (ebook) | LCC PQ7082.N7 D4 2019 (print) | DDC 863/.60998—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010305
Para Magdalena
Contents
Introduction
1. Revolution before Revolution: José Martí and José Carlos Mariátegui
2. Boom in the Revolution, Revolution in the Boom: What Is Revolutionary about the Latin American Novel of the 1960s?
3. The Fall of the Revolutionary and the Return of Liberal Democracy: Vargas Llosa’s The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984) and Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976)
4. Revolution after the Demise of Revolution: Roberto Bolaño and Carla Guelfenbein on Social Change
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
This book has benefitted from the comments made by friends and colleagues in various stages of its composition. In particular, I must single out Nicholas Birns and Ignacio López-Calvo who generously read the manuscript. Additionally, Wilfrido H. Corral and James Fuerst made useful suggestions. Vanderbilt University Press’s two anonymous readers made valuable comments. The book is infinitely better thanks to them. Obviously, all remaining flaws are my responsibility.
I am particularly grateful to the Vanderbilt University Press editors Zachary Gresham, for his enthusiasm for this project, and Joell Smith-Borne, for her work on the manuscript.
Mariano Siskind generously provided me with the text of the lecture he gave at the New School.
Earlier versions of sections of the fourth chapter, “Revolution after the Demise of Revolution: Roberto Bolaño and Carla Guelfenbein on Social Change,” appeared in Roberto Bolaño as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Like everything worthwhile I do, this book would not have been possible without the support of my wife Magdalena.
Introduction
Writing Revolution in Latin America: From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño studies the depiction of revolution in Latin American fiction. While the book begins by analyzing the first reactions to Marxist revolutionary ideas on the part of the region’s radical intellectuals, it emphasizes novels written from the 1960s to the present by such major figures as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Roberto Bolaño. These are the years when intense revolutionary enthusiasm, at least among the region’s intelligentsia and students, progressively transformed into a generalized, though far from unanimous, belief in the free market as the solution for Latin America’s social problems. 1
From the Rio Grande to Patagonia, the ideological evolution from a revolutionary to a neoliberal mainstream was a consequence of, on the one hand, repression, dictatorships, and economic crises during the 1970s and beyond and, on the other, the political hardening of the Cuban Revolution beginning in the late 1960s and the implosion of “real existing socialism,” which culminated with the fall of the Soviet bloc countries in 1989. The writers and works studied in this monograph are placed in dialogue with the political and historical evolution of the region, but not by means of a “vulgar” Marxist view of literature in which social changes are mechanically reflected in narrative. Through the analysis of several of the most important writers of the last fifty years, Writing Revolution provides a diachronic view of the political evolution of Latin America from the 1960s to the present. Despite once widely held clichéd views of the region as peopled by what essayist Carlos Rangel called “good revolutionaries,” the evolution of the region is actually representative of global historical trends. 2 However, this study does not deny the tragic specificity of the region’s history, nor the particularities of its social trajectory. This difference is, after all, one of the reasons that makes the study of Latin American culture of interest.
That said, unlike writers or, more generally, citizens in the United States or Western Europe, many Latin Americans saw the Cuban Revolution that once inspired so many to dream as an inherently local, even personal, event. Similarly, the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, which served as the laboratory for many of the neoliberal policies that today seem commonsense to so many in the United States and Europe, was also seen as local. 3 Nor were the brutal military dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay seen as foreign affairs. Given this generalized feeling of personal involvement on the part of the writers here studied, it makes sense that, as Diana Sorensen notes, “the Latin American difference is one of intensity, and that it is framed by the twin rhythms of euphoria and despair” (3). But the historical process that led from widely shared utopian expectations to neoliberal reaction was not exclusive to the region. Therefore, the study of these Latin American works and authors provides an angled view of the intellectual, cultural, and political processes that have changed the world as a whole.
Given the loose sense the word revolution often holds nowadays—it is used equally to describe political movements of reform, such as Ukraine’s Orange Revolution; groups of isolated protests, such as Hong Kong’s Umbrella revolution; or even televised wrestling events, such as WWE’s New Year Revolution—it may be necessary to specify that in this study it means a radical reordering of society. As we will see, for the authors studied, revolution in this sense is generally associated with socialism.
Though using revolution to describe a wrestling match may be a typically twenty-first century issue, already in 1928 José Carlos Mariátegui commented on the polysemous meanings of the word in the Latin America of his time: “In this America of small revolutions, the same word Revolution frequently lends itself to misunderstanding. We have to reclaim it rigorously and intransigently. We have to restore its strict and exact meaning” (“Anniversary and Balance Sheet” 128). Underlying Mariátegui’s complaint is the habit of calling military coups, or the coming to power of popular political leaders, “revolutions.” While he describes, for instance, the wars of independence from Spain, as well as the French Revolution and its offshoots, as “the liberal revolution,” Mariátegui, who is still writing under the spell of the 1917 Russian Revolution, insists on the need to reserve the contemporary use of the word for socialist movements. 4
In his Keywords , Raymond Williams writes about the historical origins for this meaning of the word:
The French Revolution made the modern sense of revolution decisive. The older sense of a restoration of lawful authority, though used in occasional justification, was overridden by the sense of necessary innovation of a new order, supported by the increasingly positive sense of progress. Of course, the sense of achievement of the original rights of man was also relevant. This sense of making a new human order was always as important as that of overthrowing an old order. (273)
For Williams, the French Revolution thus represents the main example of the term. However, like Mariátegui, he also notes the centrality of socialism in later definitions of the word:
The sense of revolution as bringing about a wholly new social order was greatly strengthened by the socialist movement, and this led to some complexity in the distinction between revolutionary and evolutionary socialism. From one point of view the distinction was between violent overthrow of the old order and peaceful and constitutional change. From another point of view, which is at least equally valid, the distinction was between working for a wholly new social order (socialism as opposed to capitalism) and the more limited modification or reform of an existing order (“the pursuit of equality” within a “mixed economy” or “post-capitalist society”). (273)
As we will see, whether they support or oppose the idea of revolution, all the authors in this study respond to this maximalist definition as predicated on the “overthrow of the old order” and on “working for a wholly new social order.” 5 Moreover, with the obvious exceptions of Martí and Mariátegui, who are, however, still reacting to this Marxist view of revolution, its meaning is primarily defined by Cuba’s revolution.