FEIWEL KUPFERBERG
The Other Postmodernism
Nothing seems to be further apart, in geography, culture, history, and
language than Latin America and Central Europe, which makes the
seeming closeness of their literatures even more paradoxical. It is as if
characters jump out of novels, travel secretly by night, meet to discuss
plots and compositional principles, and together solve the common
problems of literary techniques, returning home just before dawn. The
following morning they pop up in their writers' heads, communicating
what they have learned, keeping the creative dialogue alive in some kind
of global network of literary unconscious.
There are, of course, also important differences between the litera–
ture of Central Europe and that of Latin America. The predominant
mood in a novel by Milan Kundera is one of irony toward the self, built
upon a melancholy and suicidal quest for dramatic self-punishment, which
Kundera calls
litost.
In the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel
Allende, the individual never has any real choice; there is an aura of
Greek tragedy carrying the characters toward their destiny. The Latin
Americans do not seem to be able to do without the oracle. Their
characters move slowly toward predetermined catastrophe, as if they had
all borrowed the cloak of King Oedipus. In Kundera's novels the small,
insignificant, sometimes ridiculous things interfere with the life patterns of
the characters, shaping their fates into something totally unpredictable: a
postcard in
The Joke,
a pair of ugly pants in
Life Is Elsewhere,
a blue pill in
The Farewell Party.
Yet, when the narrator of
The Unbearable Lightness oj
Being
sets out on his voyage of inquiry into the fate of his freely created
characters, the reader of Latin American literature is hit by the shock of
recognition. He asks himself: If Thomas had lived in Peru and not in
Czechoslovakia, wou ld he not be that elusive figure, the martyr and
Trotskyist guerilla soldier Comrade Mayta whom Mario Vargas L10sa
chases into the Peruvian jungle, always knowing that the government
soldiers already have determined his fate?
Isabel Allende's nove l
On Love and On Darkness
ends with the fe–
male hero crossing the border, leaving her homeland Chile. The whole
novel, working against the very strong emotions of th is particular mo–
ment, suddenly acquires a tota ll y d ifferent meaning. The novel is not
