NOVEL AND HISPANIC STORY OF THE CENTURY

NOVEL AND HISPANIC STORY OF THE CENTURY

INTRODUCTION

The history of Latin American Literature , which began in the sixteenth century at the time of the conquistadors , can be divided roughly into four periods . During the colonial period was a mere appendage of the Spanish literature, but with the independence movements that took place in the early nineteenth century, it came on a second period dominated by patriotic themes . However, during the stage of nation-building - third - period following the preceding period , experienced a huge boom , until he reached maturity , fourth - from the 1910s , occupying a significant place within the literature. The literary production of Latin American countries form a harmonious whole , despite the differences and traits of each country.

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 , coincided with a resurgence of interest in Latin American for their distinctiveness and their own social problems writers. From that date , and increasingly greater extent , Latin American authors began to address universal themes , and over the years have come to produce an impressive body of literature that has attracted international admiration .

1.    NOVEL TO 1940 : THE NOVEL regionalist

The American Novel to 1940 to 1945 is characterized by a clearly archaic aesthetic for the period . No formal renewal in principle . His techniques are basically realistic , a legacy of the nineteenth-century novel , and sometimes even with residues of Romanticism, flourishing there. Yes there is instead a thematic renewal , adapting the novel to the most pressing and most original of American reality realities of the moment . So three basic subgenres appear :

- The novel nature, or more properly novel Jungle ( The Mayhem Eustasio José Rivera (Colombian ), the type of the gaucho of the pampas, Don Segundo Sombra by Georges Braque (Argentine ), Romulo Gallegos ( venozolano ) , Doña Barbara.

- The political novel : the novel of the Mexican Revolution ( The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela ) and " dictator novel " which does not develop until years later.

- Social novel: the indigenous novel - a landowning oligarchy that exploited the land and the lower social groups , often Indians : Jorge Huasipungo Icaza ( Ecuador ) or novels Ciro Alegría ( Peruvian ) , The world is wide and alien.

2- . Novelistic FIRST RENEWAL : TOWARDS THE MAGIC REALISM

Since 1940 the first attempts to begin renovation of the aesthetics of the novel , by what we might call "first generation" . There is a relative thematic renewal , based on the appearance of cityscapes and existential issues , but the old songs survive , especially social issues . But most striking is how reality bursts with imagination and reality so wonderful appear closely linked to the novel use of myth , legend , magic , poetry .

This is what has been called " magical realism " - a term coined by Franz Roh in 1925 to refer to a German art movement - and alternately " magical realism ", a name used by Alejo Carpentier.

Part of the formal renewal is due to reading and incorporating elements from any of the major European and American innovators of the novel ( especially Faulkner , but also Kafka and Joyce ) or taken from the surrealist language , many of whose linguistic findings are used to express how wonderful . Introduce technical innovations such as subjectivism , interior monologue , chronological jumps , etc. . , And use a bright baroque language , full of evocative images .

First to emphasize the great renewal process : Miguel Angel Asturias ( Guatemala ), with a novel that really opens the genre of " dictator novel " Mr. President, Alejo Carpentier (Cuban ) , The Lost Steps , The Century lights, Reasons of State is its own novel " dictator " , Jorge Luis Borges ( Argentina ) who never cultivated the novel, but only the short story ; Juan Rulfo (Mexican ) is the author of two books just added: stories the burning Plain and his novel Pedro Páramo, the most perfect model of fantastic realism . Other prominent authors are Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguayan , Son of man) , Juan Carlos Onetti ( urugayo , Well ) and José Lezama Lima (Cuban , Paradiso ) .

3-NEW LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL. Novel THE " BOOM "

Since 1962 (the year of publication of The Age of Enlightenment A. Carpentier, The City and the Dogs of Vargas Llosa and The Death of Artemio Cruz Fuentes C. ) are witnessing in Spain and in the rest of Europe to the surprising development of the American novel , hitherto marginalized and unknown, despite its importance and its development. It was actually , at least in part, from a sudden awareness of a novel that had developed in their own American isolation for years and it gave the impression of a "boom" , a sudden surge . It is also , to a large extent, a publishing phenomenon in which publishers have editorial responsibility and Carlos Barral and Seix - Barral in Barcelona , Gallimard, collection through the Croix du Sud in Paris and American publishers, such as South American and Losada ( Buenos Aires ) , Monte Ávila ( Caracas ) , XXI Century, Fondo de Cultura Economica , Joaquín Mortiz and Era ( Mexico ) ...

The "boom " has generational relationships. I bought writers of different ages and countries, and often with little connection between them. However, the development of the thematic issues identified by the previous generation , especially the novel taste for cityscape and existential themes ( loneliness , isolation , death ... ) , and continues with a new rural novel and especially the integration of fantasy and reality is consolidated. Formally, emphasizes the renewal of novelistic techniques through the incorporation of novel experimental techniques .

Very generally (and does not apply to all authors) the highlight is: complex narrative structures , breaking the temporal linearity, linguistic experimentation ; literary creation itself as subject, importance of the historical- social ; rejection of bourgeois morality , tendency to bind different genres in the form of the novel and a variety of narrative formulas ( using techniques of counterpoint , the combination or overlapping narratives people and points of view, the use of interior monologue , the use of the second narrative ... ) person .

This whole process of formal renewal is at the service of revolutionary literature, very committed to the reality of a land subject to violent and traumatic historical processes. We emphasize some authors .

- Ernesto Sabato (Argentine ) : strongly symbolic , his novels reflect themes such as insanity , isolation and existential malaise ( The Tunnel , On Heroes and Tombs , Abaddon the destroyer ) .

- Julio Cortázar (Argentine ) : in his stories , the fantasy element comes quite naturally and nonchalantly mixed with everyday life. His fictional work itself includes several highly experimental works, but its maximum is novel Hopscotch .

- Carlos Fuentes (Mexican ) criticizes the bourgeoisie and the political system of their country, while a renewal process of narrative language ( the Air is Clear , The Death of Artemio Cruz- life of a rural Mexican cacique proposed the novella Aura, second-person narrative ) .

- Gabriel García Márquez is the most influential author of the "boom" . His first short stories ( The litter ; Colonel no one writes ; Evil Hour , Mama 's Funeral Large ... ) and groping in search of the union of the real and the fantastic ( the imaginary world of Macondo ) . One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967 ) was the novel that marked the emergence of the "boom" and was a phenomenon in the Hispanic (and perhaps literatures world literature ).

 Other notable works are the " dictator novel " in The Autumn of the Patriarch , Chronicle of a Death Foretold , a masterful short novel , Love in the Time of Cholera .

- Mario Vargas Llosa ( Peruvian and Spanish dual nationality since 1995). His first novel The City and the Dogs , complex short story led him to fame. Worth mentioning Green House , Conversation in "The Cathedral " , technically complex lengthy dialogue, Pantoja and the chronic hilarious Peruvian army attachment to a group of prostitutes War doomsday , recreation of a hallucinated Latin American civil wars .

4 . LATEST TRENDS IN THE NOVEL

The boom left in later years in publishing favorable for multiplication and public land , often indiscriminate , authors and titles . Publishers used the reef and came to the constant release of novels. It was the surf boom.

Moreover, two streams simplify the complex picture of the novel: the novel and the mass media and the hermetic narrative or metanovel .

4.1 . Narrative and the media

The author assumes his role as a communicator in a society governed by the mass media, shifts its aesthetic product ( the novel) and a central vantage point and places it on par with other communications such as film,television , comics, pop, as camp or kitsch, whose languages ​​and techniques fail . In this current narrative of Argentine Manuel Puig ( Heartbreak Tango , Kiss of the Spider Woman ), some novels by Vargas Llosa, the Mexican Ibargüengoitia ( The Conspirators , Dead , corrosive humor, absurdity and surrealism ) or are part of Peruvian Alfredo Bryce Echenique ( A World for Julius, The exaggerated life of Martin Romagna ) .

4.2 . Tight narrative or metanovel

Other novelists in the opposite path, as sacred art and the novel placed in a privileged location , accessible only to the initiated , his elitism leads them to a tight script, for minorities. The works of Cuban Sarduy ( Where are the singers , Cobra, linguistic experimentalism risky ) or Mexican Salvador Elizondo ( The grafógrafo , Farabeuf , The Secret hipogeo are metanovelas experimental ) represent the religion of aesthetics vs. aesthetics merchandise thereof.

In addition to the novelists who have quoted above , should be highlighted in the current American narrative authors like Isabel Allende ( Chile ), Laura Esquivel ( Mexico ), Antonio Skarmeta (Chilean ), Roberto Bolaño ( Chile ), Sergio Pitol (Mexican ) or Augusto Monterroso ( Guatemala ) .

THE HISPANIC AMERICAN STORY

Along with the novel, the story has been a narrative genre widely grown in Latin America from the forties to the present. Compiled in collections , has given high-quality titles and originality. In some cases, the story has advanced structural and linguistic innovations that developed later writers boom of the sixties.

5.1 . The story in the forties and fifties

The narrators of the forties and fifties were great cultivators of the literary tale . Highlights the extraordinary contribution of Jorge Luis Borges. In a first step , influenced by the European avant-garde , writes poetry which returns since 1960 . From 1930 , he writes short stories to generically called fictions. Emphasize their storybooks as Aleph , Universal History of Infamy , Fictions or later, Brodie's Report and The Book of Sand . All stories repeat a series of obsessive themes : the chaotic and meaningless world, fate and destiny , the world as a labyrinth , the inexorable passage of time, cyclical time , the impossibility of knowing the world , the artificial nature and deceptive reality ... It is also characterized by great structural originality.

Equally important are the stories of Juan Rulfo, author of fifteen books that make up the volume The Burning Plain (1953 ) , in which the hardness is of Mexican rural life in its primitiveness and physical and moral poverty. Also stand three stories collected in War Alejo Carpentier of time, where is the problem of the impossibility of defining and dividing time . For his part, Juan Carlos Onetti continues in his stories the basic themes of his novels ( distressed and hopeless characters who wander into a sordid world) : A time to embrace , As sad as she and other stories.

4.2 . From the sixties to the present

The short stories of the narrators of the boom has gone unnoticed in some cases because of the importance of his novels. Besides García Márquez ( The Incredible and Sad Tale of Candida Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother) , others have cultivated the genre.

Julio Cortázar shows in his stories - sometimes under the influence of surrealism - a complex reality that usually appears parodied . Notable stories collected in Bestiary , Tracker , All fires , fire, secret weapons , and Cronopios famas , which reveals the absurdity of the everyday with a great sense of humor.

Mario Benedetti ( urugayo ) reflects Montevideanos , Death and other surprises and with and without nostalgia daily life and political circumstances of his country from a compromising position with a simple and colloquial language.

Special mention should Augusto Monterroso storyteller . His stories , many of them authentic microrrelatos tend to maximum condensation : complete ( and other stories ) Works , Black Sheep and Other Fables ...

From the sixties to the present, the story has been an important part in the narrative works of authors such as Mayra Montero ( Cuba ), Isabel Allende , A. Bryce Echenique and Antonio Skarmeta .