THE NEW LATIN AMERICAN NOVELISTS
Emir Rodriguez Monegal
Nothing is more difficult than trying to establish an acceptable
canon for the new Latin American novelists . To the arbitrary political
considerations which contaminate all serious discussion of the new Latin
American literature, one must add the particular problem of access
to
the
works themselves and to the basic literary criticism which attempts to
place them in a precise context. How many novels still await, in those
centuries where bibliography is in a poor or erratic state (as in many
Central American countries, or the less privileged centers of South
America), the reader with enough imagination to rescue them from the
nondescript mass of works surrounding them? How many known writers
have received the kind of critical recognition which helps not only to
distinguish but to place them in a more general and recognizable trend?
How many (even those most publicized, such as Carlos Fuentes, Comizar,
Carpentier) have really been the object of an analysis which goes beyond a
lineal reading or mere glossing over? These problems, and others which I
have no space
to
discuss now, explain why it is still impossible to establish
an acceptable canon. The most one can hope to achieve at this stage, in
order
to
indicate possible ways of reading the new novelists, is to define
some basic critical lines, and
to
illustrate them with some relevant exam–
ples.
It
is important to stress, above all, that many of the newest and most
experimental Latin American novelists are not in the strict sense, new (the
most outstanding case here is Macedonio Fernandez); they are also not
really experimental (Garcia Marquez, for example, who is above all a
traditional narrator). For that very reason, the criterion of a novelty must
be based on a recognition of the main current in the new novel. From this
point of view, and considering the vast experimentation which has occur–
red in the European and North American novel, from the first world war
