464
PARTISAN REVIEW
Victoria Ocampo had already remarked that if there was a boom
there was also inflation; Jose Donoso had predicted that the
large Latin American novels would yield to more modest ones in
reaction to the literary aggrandizing that claimed the entire fic–
tional world as its rightful territory. To date, neither proposition
has been much tested by critical reference to these works as they
appear in translation: First of all, the boom is hollow, with
neither established intellectual nor esthetic aims (no deflation
intended; rather, a recognition of the boom as the product of a
grouping of writers, a mutual fund, not a corporate takeover, to
perpetuate the financial metaphor). Second, these books are each
greeted as discrete explosions, with little attempt to see them in
relation to the author's previous writings and almost no attempt
to view seriously the interaction of these writers, whose society is
anything but anonymous. In reading Carlos Fuentes's novelistic
dirigibles-
Terra Nostra,
for example-who considers their liter–
ary worth compared to that of his early wraith
Aura?
Yet infla–
tion matters, qualitatively and quantitatively-especially in
light of the premise that Latin American fiction tends to excel–
lence in proportion to its brevity, with Borges 's fictions as axio–
matic proof and Garcia Marquez's failure
to
float another big
novel as tempting argument. (Do people keep telling you, too,
that
One Hundred Years of Solitude
doesn't hold up to a second
reading, except as a series of fabulous incidents?)
Anti-inflationary tactics of differing kinds control two
Latin American novels recently published in the United States.
Manuel Puig is one of the writers Donoso predicted, and his ca–
reer can be seen from a certain angle as that of putting the novel
on a strict diet, both thematically and formally. From the start,
his subject has been the social outsider who is actually the in–
sider by virtue of having introjected the cultural cliches available
to him. Puig's early characters were smalltimers whose petty
lives developed in the reductive grandeur of popular communi–
cation. Creatures of the mass-media arts (radio, television,
movies), they found their expression by approximating those
media, whose means became Puig's: Advertising jingles, tango
lyrics, Hollywood scripts are all presented dramatically, with an
increasing authorial absence that stands out like the black pages
proffering photos in old-fashioned scrapbooks. Recently , Puig
has concentrated on political and psychological cliches as well,
so that in
Kiss of the Spider Woman
and now
Eternal Curse
the
