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Samuel Steinberg is aPh.D. candidate in His-panic Studies at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania.He is currently writinghis doctoral dissertationon Mexico, 1968, and thespecters thereof. His workhas appeared in Journal ofSpanish Cultural Studies

and is forthcoming in CR:New Centennial Review.

It has been extensively noted that the Spanish Americannarrative Booms decline forecasts those of national-popular-centered, emancipatory sequences of the twen-tieth century. Whether gratuitous or deserved, the perceivedrelation of this decline to, variously, the overthrow of thePopular Unity government in Chile,the destruction of theMexican student movement, the defeat of guerilla groups ona continental scale, as well as the discrediting of the CubanRevolution is a forceful and compelling site of Latin Ameri-canist reflection. Our discipline maintains as secret legacy aperceived connection between particular forms of literaryculture and certain political desires, which enters a period ofboth intensity and disarticulation in the 1960s. Latin Ameri-

can literature both culminates and enters its definitive crisiswith the Boom. In perhaps the most agreed upon version ofthis story, the Boom novels consolidate the state througha thematic-narrative moment, as well as through their rolein constituting a reading public, and yet, the Boom alsorepresents a point of entry to the transnational field, whichimplies a kind of telling of the Latin American secret to theeven greater transnational reading public whose contributionto book sales is partly what defines the Boom as such. isentry constitutes its trans- or post-national moment, and isalso emblematic of larger, epochal trends with respect to the

Como irreversible proceso de ruptura, la revolucin enAmrica latina est en marcha.

Jaime Meja Duque (1974)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 11, 2007

After Macondo:

Latin American Literatureand the 1960s


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156 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

social insertion of culture. Latin Americanliteratures circulation far beyond Latin

America forms both an entry of literature aswell as Latin American differencebecausethe latter was both internationally consti-tuted as well as locally sutured throughliteratureinto the market. Along theselines we might understand the sense inwhich the Boom maintains two contradic-tory alliances: one to the national-popular/planning state, the other to a transnationalliterary market. Following this symptomatic

appearance of the Boom, what remains forliterature and literary theory is a reflectionupon what the literary can still accomplishand under what terms might it secure thefuture of its own social being, if at all.

I take as a point of departure an essaywritten by Colombian critic Jaime MejaDuque, El Boom de la narrativa latino-americana, published in 1974. From a

perspective that Neil Larsen has describedas revolutionary-historicist (69), MejaDuque addresses what he refers to as itsconstitutive ambiguity:

Tambin alienta ah la razn profun-da, la razn histrica, de que parala conciencia general en AmricaLatina tanto como en Europa y aunms all, el boomfenmeno par-

ticularmente capitalistaaparecierafuncionando en una articulacin vivay agitacional con la revolucin.Esto es lo que denominamos laambigedad constitutiva del boom.Precisamente por ser esoconstitu-tivano era superable por el boommismo. (133)

Meja Duque provides the militant versionof a reading of the Boom which has becomemore or less canonical.1 As registered here,the constitutive nature of this tensionfor

Meja Duque, an ideological and politicalambiguityentails that the Boom is not

itself capable of overcoming this ambigu-ity, which constitutes a strangely successfulexteriorization of the Cuban Revolution inspite of not only the waning of the Boomscommitment to that revolution, but also,more generally, its failure to secure its ownstake in the Latin American social field, de-spite (as a result of) its own social force (thatis, despite the fact that it appears in this revo-lutionary atmosphere). Yet, as I hope to show,

we can still retrace a specific and resonantopening to the overcoming of this ambigu-ity in the rhetorical de-constitution of theBoom. As Brett Levinson writes, Closure isthe assignment of the literary (4). Perhapsin this sense the Boom should be defined byits gesture of literary self-cancellation, whichforms its retreat from the possibility of itssocial insertion, a retreat that simultaneously

claims the only possible literary politics. Tounderstand closure as the task of the literaryis to posit the Booms deconstructive mo-ment as its political promise, as precisely thatmoment in which it is most internal to theCuban Revolution.

I will consider the Booms vicissitudeshere by reflecting upon three moments ofparticular intensity, which taken together,offer a kind of narrative sketch for the con-

ception of literature and emancipatory poli-tics in sixties-era Latin America for whichI am arguing. us, the first section readsFidel Castros 1961 Palabras a los intelectu-ales, a programmatic political and aestheticstatement that to some degree orients artand politics for the decade to come. esecond and third sections of this article,in turn, engage perhaps the most widelyread and relevant of Boom authors, Car-los Fuentes and Gabriel Garca Mrquez,keeping Castros program in mind. I notefrom the outset, however, that this argu-


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Samuel Steinberg 157

ment does not commence a reading ofBoom texts in the way one might expect.

Rather, I mean to develop an understand-ing of the Boom and its place within agenealogy of the decline of the project ofthe left as what we might designate, put inBruno Bosteelss terms, a significant site ofartistic-political suturing/unsuturing. Morespecifically, the Boom renders visible howand 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, wemight look to the Boom today as a point ofrhetorical resolution of the relation betweenart and politics, between, more particularly,modernist literature and the revolutionarydreams of the sixties.

I

e 1961 textPalabras a los intelec-tuales, in which Fidel Castro offers a pro-

grammatic address on culture and politicsto an assembly of intellectuals, provides anearly diagnosis of the ambiguous status ofliterature as well as culture in general duringrevolutionary times. It leads us most directlyto the point at which politics and art arelinked, to the socio-political demand madeupon the literary. As the Cuban leader notes,

over the course of the three-day meeting,he has listened with great interest to theconcerns of Cuban intellectuals and artists.He dismisses these concerns as the paranoidexpression of the question of whether therevolution will stamp out artistic and intel-lectual freedom (7). It is here that Cubasleader expressly delimits something likethe space of revolution. at is, he recastsrevolution as a phenomenon in space. It isnot the only time he has done so, but thecentrality this text grants culture as a modeof articulating and dividing this space is

notable. e formulation he employs pecu-liarly invokes an antinomy between inside

and outside that has served, among otheruses, as the thought-image for todays capi-talism. In the conceptualization offered, weencounter a curious, if imprecise duplica-tion or mirror image of capital space. Castroasks (or wonders aloud): Cules son losderechos de los escritores y de los artistasrevolucionarios o no revolucionarios? Heanswers: Dentro de la Revolucin: todo;contra la Revolucin: ningn derecho

(APLAUSOS) (2).2e suggestion of an inside to the

revolution creates the expectation of anoutside, which is not referenced here. In itsplace we find, rather, dentros uncommonprepositional partner, contra, as a curiousresolution to the parallelism, or rather asthe conclusion of the expected parallelismthat blocks the fulfillment of rhetorical

promise. This every right, inside/noright, against is guaranteed to all writersand artists; whether they are revolutionaryor not revolutionary, they must all remaininside the revolution. ere is no leaving,there is no outside. What remains is a posi-tion against revolution, which the writeror artist is now always already within. isposition against must thus be futile or fun-damentally obscure, circumscribed as it is by

the removal or cancellation of rights, indeedof all rights, for there can be only everyright and no right granted to intellectualswithin revolution. Revolution can grant norights outside of revolutionary dispensationbecause revolution is the condition of rightsand the final right. For revolution, Castronotes, also has a rightit has a right toexist. It must exert this right to exist notonly against old-school counterrevolution,but also against todays capitalism, which,as Fredric Jameson once noted in a famousformulation:


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[...] ends up penetrating and coloni-zing those very precapitalist enclaves(Nature and the Unconscious) whichoffered extraterritorial and Archime-dean footholds for critical effectivity.(Postmodernism 49)

Castros failure to name that which is outsideof revolution underlines the prescient natureof his intervention, for we may well deducethat Castro has recognized the key featuresof late capitalism just as these transforma-

tions were underway. As Jameson notes ina text published a few years earlier,

Late capitalism can [] be describedas the moment in which the lastvestiges of Nature which survivedon into classical capitalism are atlength eliminated: namely the thirdworld and the unconscious. e 60swill then have been the momentous

transformational period in whichthis systematic restructuring takesplace on a global scale. (Periodizingthe 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 revolutionthat contests capitalism by way of a curious

and contradictory structural redoubling ofthe spatial logic of capital itself, that is, byway of a spatial logic that is conceived as aninside without an outside. Late capitalsimmanence, its tendential conquest of ex-traterritorial enclaves, a task, according toJameson, that commences globally in thesixties, is resolved in Castros formulation bya kind of total communist insularity, whichconstitutes an unambiguous world apartfrom capitals threatened extension. Putin other terms, in order to oppose capital,Castro creates a quite suggestive (and, of

course, neatly authoritarian) revolutionaryspace that is equally, if only conceptually,

immanent. e oppositional strategy thatremains by way of this prescription is tobe againstthe revolution and not outsideof it.

Yet, the question of whether culturalworkers will betray or will support revolu-tion only obtains in the first place for thoseartists and intellectuals in a place of inde-cision. Revolutionary writers and artists,according to Castro, know precisely their

responsibility and will always act with fidel-ity to revolution. Truly anti-revolutionaryintellectuals, on the other hand, also knowtheir duty: to be the absolute enemy that isagainst, and because against, also, and final-ly, a persistent symbolic presence of an orderoutsiderevolution (that is, of Cubas externalenemies). It is this enemy, as internal limit ofthe insular order, which must be eliminated

in order to also eliminate symbolically theoutside of revolution. Castro here installs aninsular political reason: to be against is to beoutside of that reason and thus to deserveno right, to thus be treated as an absoluteenemy (unless, of course, that enemy is will-ing to undergo correction and incorporatehimself into this order of rights).3 But thereis yet a third position named by Castro,a position that is neither friend nor foe:

the field of doubt. As Castro puts it, Elcampo de la duda queda para los escritoresy artistas que sin ser contrarrevolucionariosno se sienten tampoco revolucionarios (8).is field of indecision, however, must alsobe liquidated, not necessarily by force, butas a result of the process by means of which[] esa Revolucin econmica y socialtiene que producir inevitablemente tambinuna Revolucin cultural [] (4). Put inother terms, this realm of indecision mustbe transformed by revolution into a muchmore unambiguous matter.


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If capitalism proposed to eliminate itsopposite (socialism) and conquer its exterior,

and once provided the grounds for thinkingthe world on such terms, we must considerthe exterior of a putatively Marxist-Leninistspace. What is visible to the revolution asthe possible outside to revolution? On theone hand, both outside and against, wefind the Alliance for Progress, transnationalcapital, and Yankee imperialism, but on theother, outside, and not against, in thespace of constitutive ambiguity, remains

the narrative Boom, which is caught in astrange zone of indecision as an exteriorcultural form that sympathizes with therevolution, which is inspired by the revo-lution, but which is not completely of therevolution. e social presence of the Boomthus announces both the extensive symbolicsuccess of the revolution, as well as its effec-tive insularity. As Meja Duque asserts:

Aunque producido en el contextocultural y poltico creado por larevolucin cubana, y en tal sentidoindirectamente subsidiario de ella,el boom no era ni hubiera podidoser hecho interno de esta revolucin[]. (138)

By turning now to Carlos Fuentess La

muerte de Artemio Cruz, we will see arather clear polemic around how a particularBoom novel locates itself/is located withinrevolution. More precisely, I will arguethat this novel exemplifies both the use ofthe literary object for the reconstitution ofthe national-popular in the name of theMexican Revolutiona certain MexicanRevolution, in any caseas well as the

novels use of the Cuban Revolution as anextraterritorial zone of utopian fantasy andcultural-political self-authorization.

IIIn what must appear today like a

blatent example of the appropriation ofintellectual and cultural work by the state(or rather, by a certain conception of thestate), I cite Lzaro Crdenass note of ap-proval for Carlos Fuentess La muerte deArtemio Cruz. Arguably the Mexican presi-dent most faithful to the principles of theMexican Revolution, here, some years afterhis presidency, and in light of a perceiveddegeneration of the Mexican Revolution,

he provides the coordinates for inscribingFuentess novel into revolutionary his-toryinto a faithful revolutionary history.e ex-president writes:

Gracias por el envo de su novelams reciente, La muerte de ArtemioCruz, la que he ledo con el mismointers que las anteriores, encontran-do en sta tambin una profunda

interpretacin de los sentimientosy de la actividad ante de los seresque se desenvuelven en los distintosmedios que usted describe en susnovelas con tanta fidelidad. Ademsde sus reconocidas cualidades comoescritor, me parece que la fuerza desus novelas reside en la intencinrevolucionaria que proyectan unidala fina sensibilidad del intelectual

estrechamente ligado a la vida desu pueblo y la inquietud del jovenescritor que busca una nueva y vi-gorosa tcnica literaria. Esperamoscon inters creciente sus nuevas obrasliterarias que hacen honor a Mxico,aqu y en el extranjero. (n.p.)

Here again, the Boom novel resides atthis intersection between its international

extension and the national-popular, con-veying a revolutionary form and content.4Fuentes is said to honor Mexico at home


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and abroad by presenting the image ofrevolution to both international as well as

national reading publics. Fuentess text, ac-cording to Crdenas, demonstrates his linkto the Mexican people. Significantly, thequotation appears on the back cover of anedition published by the Fondo de culturaeconmica, for their coleccin popular.Crdenas thus authorizes, even sanctifies,this relation between the national-popu-lar, the writer, the transnational field, andfinally, emancipatory politics, all of which

is reiterated in the collections mission state-ment, which also appears on the novels backcover. It reads:

La COLECCIN POPULARsignifica un esfuerzo editorialysocialpara difundir entre ncleosms amplios de lectores, de acuerdocon normas de calidad cultural y enlibros de precio accesible y presenta-cin sencilla pero digna, las moder-nas creaciones literarias de nuestroidioma, los aspectos ms importantesdel pensamiento contemporneo ylas obras de inters fundamental paranuestra Amrica. (n.p.)

By now the novel begins to form a museumof a relation between literature and thenational-popular. Already noteworthy isthe extent to which the national publish-ing industry is at pains to contain Fuentesstext, to resignify it, to produce its com-mensurability with the emancipation of thenational-popular (both in Mexico, as wellas in our America).

Meja Duque, on the contrary, assertsthat the Booms potentials for promotingregional emancipation are largely blocked

by the extent to which the Boom reflectsa commercial enterprise, rather than anaesthetic movement. In other words, the

authors commercial success, his stardom,undermines his possible solidarity with

something like the common destiny ofthe popular, a solidarity which the CubanRevolution (and not the Boom) commandsregionally and articulates to a global public(122). He continues:

El escritor del boom llega a ser,desde la plataforma de un mercadoen expansin vertiginosa, un nom-bre que vale por s solo, un ente

metafsico imbudo de esa deidad:Una firma. (122)

Reading Meja Duque strongly, it wouldappear that rather than the emergence of asingular artistic mastery, the Boom signifiesthe exact opposite. is signature appears oneditorial contracts and presages the gradualprofessionalization and self-commodifica-tion of the author. e signature also finds

its way onto the novels themselves, frequent-ly inscribing the aura of place, of the local,by way of referring the novel constantly to aconcrete historical situation. It is thus worthreflecting upon the way in which FuentessLa muerte de Artemio Cruz inscribes bothauthorial professionalization (signature-as-contract; name/book-as-commodity) as wellas an incomplete solidarity with the CubanRevolution (signature-within-revolution).

Fuentess novel closes with a ratherconventional form of authorial signature:La Habana, mayo de 1960 / Mxico,diciembre de 1961 (316). As the common-place goes, in Fuentess moment, Havanaassumes the status of the site from which acritical evaluation of the Mexican Revolutionmight be ventured.5 It might also be said thatthe route the signature evokesfrom revo-

lutionary Havana to Mexico Citymightalso serve as an allegory of the authors ownideological 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 notmerely be a flight of fancy to suggest that theotherwise customary and unremarkable in-scription of place with which Fuentes closeshis novel in this case implies an assertion ofthe revolutionary every right that Castropromises, which might well be understoodas Fuentess every right to appropriatethe revolution as image-space as a meansof dramatically and heroically launching his

namelinked to popular emancipation onvarious frontsinto a transnational literaryworld. at is, while the market securesdistribution and proliferation, revolu-tion (and more generally, evocation of thelocal) assures marketability to a world inwhich revolution was on the move, to recallthe Meja Duque quotation that serves as myepigraph. Cuba and its revolution serve the

Boom as a center of regional pride and in-ternational curiosity, just as Cuba continuesto serve, adopting Jamesons vocabulary, asan extraterritorial foothold for a reason stillputatively external or contrary to capitalspurview and which keeps utopian dreamsalive.7 It is in this sense that Cuba becomesa further instrument through which thewriter authorizes his project and sends itinto the marketplace.

While Fuentess inscription projectsthe Cuban Revolution, it also protects itand commands its insularity. Such appearsto be the critique of the Boom mounted byRoberto Fernndez Retamar in his canonicalCalibn. Fernndez Retamars text alreadybegins to register the limitations of a kind ofself-evident and self-policing revolutionaryspace by speaking of culture in terms thatrecognize the isolation of the revolutionaryproject: the essay appears now as a kind ofnoble last stand for a reconceptualization ofa culture of revolution. In this context, the

ramifications of the Padilla affair seem mostdecisive for Calibn, for it was then that

many of the Booms writers reevaluated theirrelationship to the Cuban Revolution.8

e polemical text finally and deci-sively separates friends and allies (of therevolution) from its enemies. FernndezRetamar collects the former beneath thesign of Calibn. Among many others, thegathering includes comrades as diverse asZapata, Castro, Arguedas, and Fanon, all ofwhom share the culture of Calibn, which

will become the mark of the insular, the lo-cal, the minor, and, thus, the possibilities ofliberation. Fernndez Retamar passionatelyasks, [...] what is our culture, if not thehistory and culture of Calibn? (14). Ata time when revolutionary hopes were onthe verge of a global letdown, Calibn/Cubawould stand as the continued possibility ofa utopian, revolutionary enclaveas the

place of difference itselfeven as the spaceof that utopia seemed to succumb evermoreto internal and external aggressions, to bothcounterrevolution as well as its own per-ceived repressiveness. To be sure, one doesnot find listed here the treacherous fellow-travelers of the Boom, like Fuentes, muchless constant enemies, like literary critic andservant of imperialism Emir RodrguezMonegal (14). In this way, the text divides

Calibn from the enemy, the popular fromthe hegemonic, Marts Nuestra Amricafrom Sarmientos Facundo. Calibn centerson the staging of cultural politics as the siteof a political struggle for liberation, takingthe Booms substitution of aesthetics forpolitics to its limit.9 Fernndez Retamarsessay thus returns to literary history in anattempt to reorganize it around questionsof militancy and commitment, aroundthe new mode of reading required underrevolutionary dispensation. Accordingly,Facundo is to be rejected as a violent and


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subalternizing representation of Argentina,while Mart is to be celebrated as an alterna-

tive, as a possible inversion or overturningof such a literary model. rough theseparadigmatic past texts, Fernndez Retamarprojects the cultural field of future politi-cal struggle, which is to be waged, in part,against the authority that both traitors andenemies consolidated for themselves duringthe Boom era.

Fernndez Retamar strikes out withparticular fury against Fuentes, who, as we

have seen, began a Boom novel, La muerte deArtemio Cruz, according to the authorial sig-nature at its conclusion, in Havana in Mayof 1960. In this sense, Fuentes stands as anearly example of a certain appropriation ofthe revolution. e suggestion appears to bethat unlike Borges, a truly important writerwho decided to adopt openly his positionas a man of the Right (30), Fuentes disin-

genuously falsifies his leftist credentials in abid to secure his place in letters as a means ofcompensating for his apparent lack of talent.As Fernndez Retamar continues, he speaksof a Mexican mafia, of which Fuentes is astanding member:

This group warmly expressed itssympathy for the Cuban Revolutionuntil, in 1961, the revolution pro-

claimed itself and proved to be Marx-ist-Leninistthat is, a revolution thathas in its forefront the worker-peasantalliance. From that day on, the sup-port of the mafia grew increasinglydiluted up to the last few monthswhentaking advantage of the wildvociferation occasioned by a Cubanwriters month in jailthey brokeobstreperously with Cuba. (30)

It would seem that the revolution onlyarrives, for Fernndez Retamar, after thedecisive declaration of its Marxist-Leninist

ideological content: through Marxism-Le-ninism, the revolution declares not only its

political project, but also more importantlyits very being. Until this moment it mustbe assumed that the revolution is merelya vague upheaval, an open, unnamed oc-currence for all who, like Fuentes, wouldclaim it for themselves. e Marxist-Lenin-ist declaration serves as yet another crucialseparation. After this revolution within therevolution, to borrow a phrase from RgisDebray, those who would seek to authorize

themselves in the revolutions name beginto feel not a little discomfort, which isonly amplified by Padillas show trial andimprisonment, here referred to with almosthumorous understatement as a Cubanwriters month in jail.

While from a certain perspectiveFernndez Retamar merely takes Fuentesto task regarding his less than revolution-

ary politics, the vehemence of this debate,the violence with which Fuentes must bedenounced suggests more. As Brett Levin-son writes:

e debate whether the Boom isradical or conservative, an interven-tion into the market or a movementthat plays to the market [...] missesa key point. e Boom stamps theconvergence of these opposites.In the Boom, the reactionary andradical components of literature areexposed not as one but as coinci-dental. (23)

By way of exploiting his position out-side and not against, finally becoming afigure that collapses this distinction (or thatmarks the point of its convergence), Fuentes

renders legible the need to impose a linebetween friends and enemies as increasinglyan instrumental necessity for a certain modeof thought to continue. is debate, in other


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words, is a fake that distracts those whowage it from the future to which literature

and politics will both submit, a future thatis symptomatically made present in both theBoom as well as the Cuban Revolution. Byway of understanding this futureour pres-entwe look now to a moment in whichliterature faces the future by imposing itsown closure to the social world in which itcirculated and grounded its legitimacy.

III

If the Booms decline is a constant, if attimes unintentional, invention of the Boomitself as a political commitment, then perhapsthe Boom is not lost after a failed attempt atmediating global and local, market and cul-ture, the revolution and liberal democracy.Rather the Boom is itself a calling into beingof its own failure as a pseudo-ethical act, or

rather a commitment. With the Boom LatinAmerican literature eventually denies itself aspolitical form in order to protect the futureof an emancipatory politics, in effect, inorder to cancel the substitution of aestheticsfor politics, for if Latin American literaturebecomes subject to the transnational marketduring the Boom, then the autonomy ofplanning state is simultaneously threatenedby transnational forces. It is through this

fact that we might understand both Castrosand Fernndez Retamars cultural critique aswell as their attempts to distance the CubanRevolution and emancipatory politics ingeneral from certain cultural forms. Yet theBoom is outside of revolution. As we haveseen, revolution cannot definitively stampout that which lives beyond the reach of itsinsular order.

For this reason, self-cancellation isuniquely the power of the Boom and itsonly remaining power as an emancipatorypolitics. Indeed, it enacts this power in a bid

to lose itself in the moment of its greatness.e above would suggest that if the Boom

today appears as a fallen movement, a failure,it is perhaps because we have not yet fullyrecognized the epochal, transitional drive ithad. at is, if its ability to finalize, to giveend, to blow itself up, is what the Boom nowcommemorates, this self-cancellation mightstand as its apology to a politics of libera-tion and to the revolutionary sequences ofthe sixties. It seems possible, after all, that adominant feature of the Boom was not the

mediation of a profoundly conflicted LatinAmerican modernity, but rather, a work-ing out of those conflicts as the very limitof literatures political potential. I wouldlike to suggest, in short, that rather thansome kind of appropriating instrument tobe supplanted, as critics such as FernndezRetamar have proposed, the Boom is alreadyLatin American literatures desire for nega-

tion, its desire to dissolve literatures consti-tutively treacherous socio-political presence.As Brett Levinson forcefully notes:

When we cannot distinguish litera-ture as intervention from literatureas conservation, when aestheticinnovation, revolt, disturbance, anddifference represent entrances intothe market, into the Same, literatureceases both to sustain and disrupt thesocial dichotomies upon which theglobe banks and thus concludes itsmodern function. (28)

e Booms self-negation thus hinges uponits own epiphanic realization (a moment ofrealization, indeed, that follows the aestheticnorms of the Boom novels themselves) thatit has been complicit in the dissolution of

the imagined wall of separation betweenmarket functions and rebellion, that itprovides certain grounds for indecision inrevolutionary times.


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As I note above, ngel Rama offers thepublication ofCien aos de soledadaccord-

ing to many definitions the culmination ofthe Boom at its most widely intelligible mo-mentas a possible moment of its closure(El boom 85-86). is is not only true inthe sense that Cien aos de soledadbecame sogenre-defining that it closed the very mean-ing of the Boom. Nor is it merely that thenovels extensive international circulationand continued popularity have functionedas a reductive emblem for the whole of

Latin American culture. It seems also thatthe novel itself ends in a kind of prescrip-tive cancellation of writing, conceived asa mode of bringing into being a liberatedLatin American modernity. It would seemthat Garca Mrquez ends his great book bylearning the lesson of the sixties. e bookdoes not mark a failure, but an apprentice-ship 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 re-molino de polvo y escombros cen-trifugado por la clera del huracnbblico, cuando Aureliano salt oncepginas para no perder el tiempoen hechos demasiado conocidos,y empez a descifrar el instante enque estaba viviendo, descifrndolo a

medida que lo viva, profetizndosea s mismo en el acto de descifrar laltima pgina de los pergaminos,como si se estuviera viendo en unespejo hablado []. Sin embargo,antes de llegar al verso final ya habacomprendido que no saldra jamsde ese cuarto, pues estaba previstoque la ciudad de los espejos (o losespejismos) sera arrasada por el

viento y desterrada de la memoriade los hombres en el instante enque Aureliano Babilonia acabara dedescifrar los pergaminos, y todo lo

escrito en ellos era irrepetible desdesiempre y para siempre porque todas

las estirpes condenadas a cien aos desoledad no tenan una segunda opor-tunidad sobre la tierra. (448-49)

Against the better judgment of one who haspretensions of speaking as a critic and notas a fan, I am tempted to concede to Gar-ca Mrquez the last word. As Jean Francoreminds us, Garca Mrquezs Macondoonly needed to be mentioned for people to

understand that it was a fantasy of a liber-ated territory (7). In this sense, the textevokes Cubas insular liberation and thekind of literary imaginary that necessarilysustains such liberations. Carlos Fuentesscharacterization of the text makes even moreexplicit the relation between literature andutopian thought/practice. Fuentes writes,La fundacin de Macondo es la fundacin

de Utopa []. Como la Utopa de Moro,Macondo es una isla de la imaginacin (Lanueva novela 60). However, this imaginedutopia, this liberated island, is organized byits own undoing. In this literary cancellationresides the rhetoricalbut not necessarilyeffectivecancellation of the ambiguousfrontier dividing two enemy spatio-politi-cal orders.

Cien aos de soledadsuggests, in other

words, the taking root of an alteration inliteratures social insertion between thenational-popular and transnational market,which perhaps might be best understood asa kind of decision to no longer reproducethe national-popular or work for its eman-cipation in writing. Cien aos de soledadis,in other words, a book between literaturescommitment to the national-popular andthe planning state and that which succeedsit. It is, in this sense, not the high point ofthis relation, but the sign of its cancellation.We may wish to understand Macondo, the


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peculiar spatial enclave that appears cen-trally in Cien aos de soledad, as the product

of the authors prescience, as a thinking ofwhat must come afterMacondo. Macondois the point of degeneration of the utopian,the self-realized futility of phantasmaticinsular liberations, whether forwarded bywriting or the state. Garca Mrquezs textregisters most ambivalently the vicissitudesof utopian regional or local thinking inprecisely the moment during which thenation-state/literature seemed to be losing

ground as a primary organ of hegemonicarticulation, yet when the perceived fulfill-ment of the global or transnational fieldhad not yet forged other, alternative modesof representing a given social field. In otherwords, he writes this novel in the midst of akind of literary decay, but before anythinghad arrived to replace (or displace) theliterary as such (say, testimonio, cultural

studies, new media, and so on). Suffice itto say, written as a kind of midwife textfor the transition towards a new epoch, thenovel closes the literature-emancipatorypolitics alliance that characterizes much ofLatin Americas literary modernity. As ngelRama writes:

Cuando en el ao sesenta y siete lapublicacin de Cien aos de soledad

cierra un determinado perodo de laobra de Garca Mrquez, tambincorona un proyecto que comienza aesbozarse y a plantearse a fines de ladcada del cuarenta; y ese proyecto,que en varios textos iniciales de Gar-ca Mrquez comienza a delinearse,es justamente el de representar unaliteratura nacional y popular. (Edi-ficacin 30)

is novel culminates a project because, forRama, it represents a dialectical advance,understood as the:

[e]nfrentamiento de materiales quese destruyen a s mismos, y que,

simultneamente, generan la posi-bilidad de unas formas superioresde las cuales emerja la lnea internazigzagueante que va desarrollando lacultura. (30)

Perhaps what Rama observes here is theexpression of Garca Mrquezs willingconceptual inclusion in the insular revo-lutionary order. His novel thematizes the

destruction of writing as a submission toCastros programmatic statement by meansof which, as I cite above, [] esa Revolu-cin econmica y social tiene que producirinevitablemente tambin una Revolucincultural [] (4). Macondos dissolutionthus represents an advance for thoughtand politics, figuring the symbolic-effectiveextension of the Cuban Revolution, not inthe obscure fashion in which opportunistshave made it circulate, but rather as a powerover writing.

I take this chance to refer my argu-ment to one made by Alberto Moreiras inhis Exhaustion of Differencewith respect toJos Mara Arguedass suicide, which hecasts as both literary-symbolic as well asactual-effective. With Arguedass literaryact, he writes, Latin American founda-

tional utopianism comes to its end (207).It is here that literature closes itself offfrom its power to mediate and resolve thesocial conflicts characteristic of the LatinAmerican nation-states; literature losesinthis literary actits power and razn deser. Macondos dissolution, going further,marks literatures cancellation of literatureprecisely as a commitment to revolutionaryutopias, founded in the collective socialsubject that once answered to the name ofthe national-popular. Such desires can onlybe achieved, after Garca Mrquezs literary


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act, through a revolutionary politics proper(again, over against the historical alliance

literature-state). e text seems, as BrunoBosteels has put it, programmatically, tounsuture art and politics (158).

rough the erasure of Macondo, afigure for the utopian enclave, this unsutur-ing commences. e novel foresees the loss ofthe potential of all such liberated territories inwriting, that is, the loss of obscure imaginaryliberated territories. rough the reading actthe potential of imagined liberated territory

dissolves, is cancelled and dispersed in theair; it disappears, and we are yet condemnedfor betraying revolution by believing thatour liberation could ever have been read.e text thus not only stands as a statementon the fallen status of the political and socialinsertion of the writers intervention, butmore strongly, brings this fallen status intobeing. A re-appropriation of this act of liter-

ary-utopian self-cancellation might rescueus yet from a static relation to literature asa contingency of the market, to emancipa-tory politics as a failed project. Macondosdissolution marks a closure of literature andrevolutionary-utopian politics, but it is alsoan opening. What remains to be seen, eventoday, is whether that opening is a call toforgiveness between literature and revolu-tion, or instead, a chance to cut our losses by

forging a different politics beyond the reachesof literature, a politics that resides neither inthe domain of culture, nor in its negation,and always without literatures redemption.Unlike Arguedas, Garca Mrquez lives onand must commit to repetition.

The community figured in GarcaMrquezs later novel, Crnica de unamuerte anunciada, possesses a structuralsimilarity to Macondo, and not only withrespect to its status as territorial enclave.10By way of concluding, I would like to sug-gest that Crnica de una muerte anunciada

turns on the repetition of Macondos dis-solution, which in turn poses a challenge

to any expectation of Macondos eventualredemption. is very repetition suggeststhe way in which the spectral continuityof literature is literatures bid to constantlyvoid redemption. In this sense, the Boomcontinues as its own constant self-cancel-lation. Macondos dissolution, which, as Inote above, at some point seemed to aver aradical rupture, is by the time ofCrnica deuna muerte anunciada, a ritual that saturates

the text. is now ritualistic literary cancella-tion, in effect, presents itself as the only wayof grounding the writing task and allowingit to continue after Macondo. If GarcaMrquez rather melodramatically sweepsaway Macondo in what might be the morecelebrated self-imposed literary cancellation,Crnica de una muerte anunciada reiteratesthis closure. Crnica de una muerte anun-

ciada produces its own death as a commenton its own writing as a failed project, as adying labor, but in this case formally, andthus, generically. is double cancellation, itis worth repeating, represents the emergencefor literature of a new razn de (no) serfol-lowing the termination of the political formsof social integration and emancipation thatpreviously had organized and legitimated theLatin American literary task.11

Carlos J. Alonso begins his conclu-sions on Crnica de una muerte anunciadaby noting how the text seems to commenton the very failure of the writing task. Hewrites:

Writing, the suggestion appears tobe, cannot serve as the instrumentfor redemption and cleansing that

the novel envisions, since it is itselfconstituted and sustained through aviolence that traverses it to the verycore. (162)


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Alonso argues that the text itself is organizedor reigned by its own reflection on writing

as a possible instrument for redemptionand cleansing (162), a redemption, oneshould add, no longer offered through thenational-popular and the planning statewhose desire the novel once promised toembody or inspire. is writing thus alle-gorizes, to put it in other terms, literaturesown decline as an instrument throughwhich the national-popular might emergeand the planning state might effectively

imagine social justice. e text can protectneither the Latin American secret, nor itsown appearanceas literature and thus effaces its textuality.

is knowledge [...] also appears tobe incorporated into the novel as apersistent attempt to eradicate thestructure of differences on which thetext is constructed. Seen in this light,

Chronicle of a Death Foretoldseems tobe forever on the verge of revertingto a state of undifferentiation thatwould jeopardize the system of dif-ferences that rules the text. (162)

e erasure that Alonso observes in the text,which is effected in distinct and diversemanners but particularly through simi-larities between characters names, finally

evinces its own [...] violent essence, dem-onstrating that it must speak the contradic-tory knowledge that it embodies even at theexpense of its own unmaking (163). Alongthe lines ofCien aos de soledad, Crnica deuna muerte anunciada cancels itself by wayof fulfilling its own narrative order. isrepetition, however, should not be readas the recovery of some kind of failed

attempt at decisive literary cancellation inthe case ofCien aos de soledad, but ratheras the hope of continuing the very meaning

of that cancellation.A widely known anecdote holds that

Garca Mrquez forswore writing anothernovel as long as Pinochet held power in Chile.Only one novel, El otoo del patriarca,standsbetween the writing ofCien aos de soledadand Crnica de una muerte anunciada. Yet,Crnica de una muerte anunciada appeared in1981, long before Pinochet would pass fromthe scene. While thisgap evinces the futilepower of literary silence, equally compellingis the repetition of literary cancellation wit-

nessed by Garca Mrquezs return to form.From the perspective of literatureafterthe Boom, after Macondothere must berepetition of this literary non-redemption,which organizes the constant interruptionof our own desire to reconstitute literaturessocio-political grounds and task.

Notes1

As Larsen notes, scholars such as GeraldMartin share this understanding of the Boom asbeing overdetermined by the Cuban Revolutionand the atmosphere it created (70). In Larsensexcellent essay, he regards this revolutionary-historicist critical optic as the one that []brings us closest to the complex truth of thephenomenon itself (70), at least comparedto what he calls the aestheticist approach ofthe Boom authors themselves or the vulgarsociological standpoint adopted by Rama inthe essay El boom en perspectiva. It is worthnoting that both Meja Duque as well as Ramaappear in the present essay as symptoms of whatLarsen insightfully names, in a gloss on HalpernDonghi, the seeming right/left aphasia of theboom (72).

2 For an excellent reading of this speech, seeDesiderio Navarros In Media Res Publicas: OnIntellectuals and Social Criticism in the CubanPublic Sphere. Here I take the chance to thank

him for alerting me to this passage.3 My understanding of the friend/enemydivide as a key dimension of the political isinformed, above all, by a series of texts in which


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Alberto Moreiras engages Carl Schmitt. Ofcrucial importance here is Moreirass take on theSchmittian nomic order, although its preciseterms are not applied here. See Beyond theLine: On Infinite Decolonization (580-83).

4 e relation between literature and thestate that culminates and declines in the sixtiesis sustained by a postulation of the national-popular as the site of political potential, thatis, as the site of the realization of a relationbetween literature and politics. In fact, withoutthis extension into the domain of the national-popular, there is no relation supposed between

literature and politics, and thus, for art, nojustification for existence vis--vis a putativelynational-popular state.

5 Maarten van Deldens formulation puts itwell: Fuentes sketches a narrative in ArtemioCruzin which the revolutionary ideal, betrayedin Mexico, and defeated in Spain, now experi-ences a new dawn in Cuba [] It is of crucialsignificance that Fuentes wrote part ofArtemioCruzin Cuba in the year after the Revolution,and that he wants his readers to know this, aswe can see from the dates and place names thatappear at the close of the text (60).

6 Jorge Castaeda notes that following thePadilla case (as well as Castros support for theSoviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) [] Fuentesnever went back [to Cuba] but refused to criti-cize the Revolution directly [] (185). Fromthis we might conclude that Fuentess now-wan-ing commitment to the revolution finds a spatialarticulation traced in his signature.

7 To be sure, the utopian dreams that Cubaallows are not strictly communist dreams. Inpart, this seems to be central to FernndezRetamars critique of Fuentes and might evenprovide grounds for thinking Cubas own am-biguity.

8 e point of reference here is HebertoPadillas collection of poems, Fuera del juego(1968), which was found by the Unin deEscritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) to beagainst the revolution. His imprisonmentaroused suspicions of a perceived Stalinizationand provoked significant sectors of the interna-

tional left to sever ties with Cuba.9 The point of reference here is Idelber

Avelar, who has argued most clearly that Boomnarrative exerted something like a compensa-tory function for the uneven or incompletemodernization of Latin America, a compensa-tory function that produced not merely theaestheticization of politics but the substitutionof aesthetics for politics (11).

10 I will briefly recall the novel. e textscentral event is the murder of Santiago Nasar.Because we know who killed him and how, thenarrators curious search for the truth revolves

around a different question. e purportedlycentral secretwhether Santiago Nasar trulywent to bed with ngela Vicario (his murdererssister)is never resolved.

11Crnica de una muerte anunciada repeatsCien aos de soledadin other ways as well. eduplication of the character Mercedes Barcha,future wife of the narrator/Garca Mrquz,in both texts, of which Luis Alonso Girgadoreminds us (63), suggests further the continuitybetween the two narratives. More notable is therepetition of the name Aureliano Buenda, as notonly an intertextual function but as a markerof something like a time lapse between the twotexts writing as well.

Works CitedAlonso, Carlos J. Writing and Ritual in Chron-

icle of a Death Foretold. Gabriel GarcaMrquez: New Readings. Ed. Bernard Mc-Guirk and Richard Cardwell. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1987.Alonso Girgado, Luis. Crnica de una muerte

anunciada: gua de lectura. A Corua:Tambre, 1993.

Avelar, Idelber. e Untimely Present: Postdictato-rial Latin American Fiction and the Task ofMourning. 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 Is-sue ofDispositio/n 25.52 (2005): 147-58.


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Crdenas, Lzaro. Dust Jacket. La muerte deArtemio Cruz. 1962. Mexico: Fondo decultura econmica, 1973.

Castaeda, Jorge. Utopia Unarmed: e LatinAmerican Left After the Cold War. New York:Vintage, 1994.

Castro, Fidel. Palabras a los intelectuales. Monte-video: Comit de intelectuales y artistas deapoyo a la revolucin cubana, 1961.

Fernndez Retamar, Roberto. Caliban and OtherEssays. Trans. Edward Baker. Minneapolis:U of Minnesota P, 1989.

Franco, Jean. e Decline and Fall of the Lettered

City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cam-bridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2002.Fuentes, Carlos. La muerte de Artemio Cruz.

1962. Mexico: Fondo de cultura econmi-ca, 1973.

. La nueva novela hispanoamericana.1969. Mexico: Joaqun Mortiz, 1997.

Garca Mrquez, Gabriel. Cien aos de soledad.1967. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1983.

. Crnica de una muerte anunciada.

1981. New York: Vintage Espaol, 2003.. El otoo del patriarca. 1975. Barcelona:Plaza y Jans, 2001.

Jameson, Fredric. Periodizing the 60s. e 60sWithout Apology. Ed. Sohnya Sayres. Min-neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

. Postmodernism, or, e Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Larsen, Neil. e Boom Novel and the Cold Warin Latin America.Reading North by South: OnLatin American Literature, Culture, and Politics.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.

Levinson, Brett. e Ends of Literature: e LatinAmerican Boom in the Neoliberal Market-place. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

Meja Duque, Jaime. El boom de la narrativalatinoamericana. Narrativa y neocoloniaje enAmrica latina. Buenos Aires: Crisis, 1974.

Moreiras, Alberto. Beyond the Line: On In-finite Decolonization. American LiteraryHistory17.3 (2005): 575-94.

. The Exhaustion of Difference: ThePolitics of Latin American Cultural Studies.Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Navarro, Desiderio. In Media Res Publicas: OnIntellectuals and Social Criticism in the Cu-ban Public Sphere. Trans. Alessandro For-nazzari and Desiderio Navarro. Nepantla:Views from South 2.2 (2001): 355-71.

Padilla, Heberto. Fuera del juego. Buenos Aires:Aditor 1969.

Rama, ngel. El boom en perspectiva. Msall del boom: literatura y mercado. Ed. n-gel Rama. Mexico: Marcha, 1981.

. La narrativa de Gabriel GarcaMrquez: edificacin de un arte nacional ypopular. Escala: Bogot, 1991.

van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, andModernity. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1998.

Documents

11.1steinberg