1. An introduction to late 20th C. Latin American literature
El Boom
An introduction to late 20th C. Latin American literature Or
Some politico-cultural reasons why “the story is truer than truth”

2. El Boom Boom Boom-and-Bust
a deep, hollow sound like the roar of a cannon or of big waves ... a sudden activity and increase in business, prices or values of property...
an economic cycle of great prosperity followed by a serious depression.

3. Literature’s curious problems in Latin America
The Spanish Inquisition established branches in capitals such as Lima and México. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books, c.1570) codified what books were to be censored, thus recognizing the power of literature to subvert the status quo.
Importing novels to colonial Spanish America was strictly prohibited by the Spanish Crown since the late sixteenth century. But this was not foolproof and books of chivalry, picaresque novels and even Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605, 1615) managed to circulate. However, the early Latin American writers were forced to channel their inventiveness differently. History texts, chronicles, accounts of the conquest and exploration of America become the only ‘legal’ space where the native imagination can prosper.
As a result, Fiction and History become united in a particularly curious way. What is history? and What is fiction? are questions that at some level or other can be asked in dealing with colonial texts and beyond.

4. Two examples of Fiction and History in Latin American Literature:
Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True Account of the Conquest of New Spain, 1580)
written by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, foot soldier in Cortéz's army
before independence from Europe of any American state
autobiographical description of the conquest of México ( )
chronicle of historical events
seen by some critics as the "first Spanish American novel“
characterisation of Cortéz, Moctezuma, and many other historical figures accentuates the humane, the personal, and other qualities
narrative composition reminiscent of fictional best-sellers of the time – i.e. books of chivalry like Amadís de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul 1508), Tirant lo Blanc (1490), etc. – where valiant knights travelled to unknown lands to face uncertain perils in the pursuit of high minded victories.
In 1580, before the independence of any American state, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a foot soldier in Hernán Cortéz's army, writes Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True Account of the Conquest of New Spain [1632]) an autobiographical description of the conquest of México ( ). This chronicle of historical events, is seen by some critics as the "first Spanish American novel". Bernal Díaz's characterization of Cortéz, Moctezuma, and many other secondary characters accentuates the humane, the personal, and other characteristics that stand out in them. The composition of the book is reminiscent of the fictional best-sellers of the time, that is, books of chivalry such as Amadís de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul [1508]), Tirant lo Blanc (1490), etc. In these, valiant knights travelled to unknown lands to face uncertain perils in the pursuit of high minded victories.
In 1816, after the independence of México from Spain, Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi pens El periquillo Sarniento (The Itching Parrot). This work is officially considered to be the first Latin American Novel. Lizardi -a journalist- was unable to write freely in local gacetas (newspapers) on account of censorship. Thus, he ends up writing a "novel" that allows him to criticize the backwardness of his native country and the flaws in the "national character" of its people.

5. Two examples of Fiction and History in Latin American Literature:
El periquillo Sarniento (The Itching Parrot, 1816)
written by Mexican journalist Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi after independence of México from Spain
considered the first Latin American Novel
censorship prevented journalists from freely writing any opinions in local gacetas (newspapers)
Lizardi uses a ‘novel’ to criticize
The backwardness of his native country
The flaws in the "national character" of its people.
In 1580, before the independence of any American state, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a foot soldier in Hernán Cortéz's army, writes Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True Account of the Conquest of New Spain [1632]) an autobiographical description of the conquest of México ( ). This chronicle of historical events, is seen by some critics as the "first Spanish American novel". Bernal Díaz's characterization of Cortéz, Moctezuma, and many other secondary characters accentuates the humane, the personal, and other characteristics that stand out in them. The composition of the book is reminiscent of the fictional best-sellers of the time, that is, books of chivalry such as Amadís de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul [1508]), Tirant lo Blanc (1490), etc. In these, valiant knights travelled to unknown lands to face uncertain perils in the pursuit of high minded victories.
In 1816, after the independence of México from Spain, Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi pens El periquillo Sarniento (The Itching Parrot). This work is officially considered to be the first Latin American Novel. Lizardi -a journalist- was unable to write freely in local gacetas (newspapers) on account of censorship. Thus, he ends up writing a "novel" that allows him to criticize the backwardness of his native country and the flaws in the "national character" of its people.

6. Evolution of the Latin American novel
Constrained by religious and political strictures, and conditioned to glorify and differentiate the character of emerging nations, the novel in Latin America evolves out of the necessity to speak out, to preach, to educate the emerging peoples of the continent.
Writers see themselves as privileged voices in charge of “creating a national literature that refers to and documents the national reality”
(Argentinean writer Esteban Echeverría, )

7. Notes on Chilean author José Donoso's “The Boom...A Personal History”
On the regional nature of the Spanish American novel prior to 1960:
Before 1960 it was very uncommon to hear laymen speak of the "contemporary Spanish American novel": there were Uruguayan, Ecuadorian, Mexican or Venezuelan novels. (. . .) The novelist in the Spanish American countries wrote for his parish: about the problems of his parish and in the language of his parish, addressing himself to the number and level of his readers – quite different, certainly, in Paraguay than in Argentina, in Mexico than in Ecuador – which his parish was able to offer him, without much hope of anything else.
Chile

8. Notes on Chilean author José Donoso's “The Boom...A Personal History”
On the different non-Hispanic influences in 1960s Latin American fiction:
On the other hand, today's Spanish American novel was from the very beginning a mestiza, a crossbreeding, a disregarding of the Hispanic American tradition (as much disregard for what was Hispanic [+Spain] as for what was American [-Spain]) and draws itself almost totally from other literary sources, because without a whimper, our orphaned sensibility let itself be infected by the North Americans, the French, the English, and the Italians, all of whom seemed to us more "ours," much more "our own" than a Gallegos (Doña Bárbara) or a Güiraldes (Don Segundo Sombra) for example, or a Baroja [Spanish novelist ( )].
Chile

9. Notes on Chilean author José Donoso's “The Boom...A Personal History”
On the pernicious effect of the regionalista / criollista canon and the prescriptions of social realism:
A novel was considered good if it loyally reproduced those [indigenous] concerns, all that which specifically makes us different – which separates us – from other areas and other countries of the continent: a type of foolproof, chauvinistic machismo. (. . .) the only true criterion of excellence is the precision required to depict what is inherently ours, the verifiable verisimilitude that tends to transform a novel into a faithful document portraying or capturing a segment of univocal reality.
Chile

10. Notes on Chilean author José Donoso's “The Boom...A Personal History”
More on the harmful effects of criollista literary dogma
In addition to being unmistakably ours, as the criollistas wanted, the novel should be, above all else, "important," "serious," an instrument which would be directly useful to social progress. (. . .) Formal experimentation was prohibited. The architecture of the novel and its language were to be simple, flat, colourless, sober, and poor. (. . .) The fantastic and the personal elements, the strange and marginal writers, those who "abused" the language or the form, were exiled by these criteria, which reigned for so many years that the magnitude and the potential of the novel were sadly impoverished.
Chile

11. The first phase of the Boom:
A novel: Carlos Fuentes's La región más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear, 1958)
A momentous event : The Congress of Intellectuals at the University of Concepción, Chile (1962)
A personality: Carlos Fuentes
A socio-political phenomenon: The Cuban Revolution
A year before the Congress of Intellectuals in Concepción, a novel called Where the Air Is Clear by Fuentes had fallen into my hands. As I read it, literature took on another dimension. . . (37) The theme which was repeated and repeated and which clearly predominated [at the Congress of Intellectuals] was the common complaint that as Latin Americans we knew European and North American literature perfectly, in addition to our own national literatures, but that isolated by a lack of means and by the egotism and myopia of the publishing houses and the very methods of book distribution, we were almost completely ignorant of literature from other countries on the continent. (33) Looking, as always, at the phenomenon from my personal point of view, I see the Mexican Carlos Fuentes as the first active and conscious agent of the internationalization of the Spanish American novel of the 1960s. (37) Not only because of the literary stimulus of his first novels, but also because of his generosity in the form of admiration and help, Carlos Fuentes has been one of the precipitating agents of the Boom. For better or for worse, his name goes on being linked with it as much for his reality as for the legend of his Mafia and his cohorts. (53) In this sense, the most important thing that Carlos Fuentes told me during the trip to Concepción was that after the Cuban Revolution he agreed to speak publicly only of politics, never of literature; that in Latin America the two were inseparable ant that now Latin America could only look toward Cuba. (. . .) the entire Congress of Intellectuals. . . was strongly politicized as a result of his presence. (. . .) I think that this faith and political unanimity -or near unanimity- was then, and continued to be until the Padilla case exploded in 1971, one of the major factors in the internationalization of the Latin American novel, unifying outlooks and goals, providing an ideological structure to which one could be more or less close -seldom totally opposed- and for a time giving the feeling of a continental cohesion. (49)

12. The second & third phases of the Boom:
Mario Vargas Llosa
received the Biblioteca Breve Prize from the Barcelonese publishing house of Seix Barral in 1964, when only twenty-four-years-old
La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1963) caused the whole continent to talk.
Perhaps it would not be too risky to offer the opinion that its success was in part due to the fame and ‘maneuverings’ of Carlos Fuentes, who had fertilized the land so that the thing could take root.(61)
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Perhaps the definitive moment of the Latin American Boom occurs with [this] publication (. . . ) One edition untiringly follows another: one speaks in terms of millions of copies. (62)
A year before the Congress of Intellectuals in Concepción, a novel called Where the Air Is Clear by Fuentes had fallen into my hands. As I read it, literature took on another dimension. . . (37) The theme which was repeated and repeated and which clearly predominated [at the Congress of Intellectuals] was the common complaint that as Latin Americans we knew European and North American literature perfectly, in addition to our own national literatures, but that isolated by a lack of means and by the egotism and myopia of the publishing houses and the very methods of book distribution, we were almost completely ignorant of literature from other countries on the continent. (33) Looking, as always, at the phenomenon from my personal point of view, I see the Mexican Carlos Fuentes as the first active and conscious agent of the internationalization of the Spanish American novel of the 1960s. (37) Not only because of the literary stimulus of his first novels, but also because of his generosity in the form of admiration and help, Carlos Fuentes has been one of the precipitating agents of the Boom. For better or for worse, his name goes on being linked with it as much for his reality as for the legend of his Mafia and his cohorts. (53) In this sense, the most important thing that Carlos Fuentes told me during the trip to Concepción was that after the Cuban Revolution he agreed to speak publicly only of politics, never of literature; that in Latin America the two were inseparable ant that now Latin America could only look toward Cuba. (. . .) the entire Congress of Intellectuals. . . was strongly politicized as a result of his presence. (. . .) I think that this faith and political unanimity -or near unanimity- was then, and continued to be until the Padilla case exploded in 1971, one of the major factors in the internationalization of the Latin American novel, unifying outlooks and goals, providing an ideological structure to which one could be more or less close -seldom totally opposed- and for a time giving the feeling of a continental cohesion. (49)

13. The writers of the Boom discovered, as if for the first time and all at once, that:

14. The World is an Inescapable Fabrication
the world is a FABRICATION and full of delirious improbabilities but, alas, still real enough and thus INESCAPABLE (cf. the mirror of J L Borgés)

15. Where the Imagination is King
the imagination is nearly always right, either because
SOMEONE HAS ALREADY DONE WHAT YOU HAVE ONLY IMAGINED (‘tradition’ - reinventing Shakespeare; ‘intertextuality’ - all texts refer to other texts, starting from the same base of ‘language’; repetition - from one’s own daily routine all the way to the cycles of history) or because
YOU HAVE IMAGINED A FITTING METAPHOR, image or representation for someone else’s need, desires, hopes, aspirations

16. And Fiction is deadly serious play…
fiction, under these circumstances, is both a PLAYGROUND and a BATTLEFIELD - the place where a culture’s central quarrels may be fought out and seen to be fought out
CULTURE = how you (or your society) define your identity, values, beliefs

17. Realism ... ?
What is ‘realism’ in Latin America? It did not work as a literary and artistic style because it rested on a commitment to a solid material and historical world no one in South America quite believed in.
The best known play of Ruíz de Alarcón is called The Suspect Truth and its moral is that habitual liars make even the truth sound uncertain when they happen to tell it (Richard III, 1984, political spin doctors).

18. … or truthful doubt?
A poem by Sor Juana says “solamente lo que toco veo” – she takes her eyes into her hands and will only see what she can touch (a powerful reinvention of St Thomas’ doubt at Christ’s resurrection)

19. The other novel
Thus the Boom produced the other (super realist) novel, which reported absolutely everything (like Borgés’ autistic savant character Funes) that could be seen, even in hallucinations – a modernized baroque* that showed the brilliant trail of its deceptions (in a self-conscious narrative style known as ‘metafiction’) BUT ALSO lovingly and carefully relating the fragile life of facts which in other places (back in Europe and its realistic novel) would seem safe, stable, ordinary.
* baroque = a flamboyant and exaggerated late classical style begun in 16th Europe but typical of colonial architecture in Latin America

20. Magic Realism
So the ultimate effect of this new narrative style was to reinvent, for very local reasons, what all great literary art worldwide has always tried to do – make us see the familiar with new eyes…

21. A set of characteristics discernible in many of the novels of the Boom:
The use of complex narrative structures requiring an active reader capable of organizing the narrative matter by him/herself.
The development of linguistic experimentation from:
the pursuit of a cultural identity that creates its own reality within the novel (i.e. the universe of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude).
to the baroque displays of writers like Carpentier, Lezama Lima, and others.
The insistence on the writer's right to create his/her own fictional reality.
Frequently the problem of literary creation is dealt with as a theme, that is, the tendency towards metafiction (self-conscious writing).
Historical/Social novels abound: ( i.e. The Lost Steps, Pedro Páramo, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Time of The Hero, etc.)
The exploration of immediate reality to grotesque extremes of caricature.
Humour makes its debut in Latin American fiction.

22. A set of characteristics discernible in many of the novels of the Boom:
Existential themes are still dealt with, but while ignoring psychological analysis, and often pursuing mythical or allegorical formulations (i.e. Pedro Páramo, Hopscotch, etc.)
Rejection of bourgeois – middle class – morality, certain conventional social mores, and even the customary way of perceiving reality (rationalism).
Rejection of dominant cultural contexts and models (such High vs. Low culture), especially in younger novelists such as Manuel Puig, Reinaldo Arenas, Luis Rafael Sánchez, etc.
A tendency to unify different genres: poetry and narrative, music and narrative, film and narrative.
Segmentation and fragmentation of narrative structures (i.e.. Hopscotch, The Kiss of the Spider Woman, etc.)
The incorporation of popular culture and mass produced cultural artefacts in theme and/or form.

23. Isabel Allende
Born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 to a Chilean diplomat who ran away when Allende was 3
Allende's mother, Panchita Llona Barros, took her to her grandfather's mansion in Chile, where she lived until she was 10
At 19, she married a Chilean engineer and had a thriving career as a journalist, writing an advice column and hosting her own TV program
Her uncle, Salvador Allende, the first avowed Marxist to be elected president in a Latin American country, was killed in 1973 in a CIA-backed military coup that established the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Shortly after the coup, Isabelle Allende fled the country for Venezuela, followed by her husband and children.

24. The House of the Spirits
On Jan. 8, 1981, Isabel Allende began a letter to her grandfather, who was nearing 100 and on his death bed. “People die”, he had told her, “only when they are forgotten.”
After 500 pages, Allende realized she had a novel, not a letter. "Writing a book," she thought, "might hold him to the Earth." She has, for luck, begun all subsequent books on the same day, each serving in some way as a spell or a talisman to revive flagging spirits or exorcise demons. "A book," she has written, "is only a way to touch someone, a bridge extended across loneliness and obscurity."
Allende's childhood was the raw material for The House of the Spirits but it put her in the vanguard of “el boom’s” younger generation of novelists…

25. One Hundred Years of Solitude The House of the Spirits
One Hundred Years of Solitude and The House of the Spirits : parallel novels
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The House of the Spirits
Context
Written after the triumph of the Cuban revolution (1952)
Written after the tragedy of Salvador Allende’s defeat by military coup (1973)
Historical themes
Historical cycles in the novel are always vicious, inescapable defeats
Progressive enlightenment is portrayed as a possibility (or even as essential for women)
Female protagonists
Ursula Iguarán is the backbone of the Buendía family, but as such also underpins a patriarchal society
Clara maintains both family and narrative continuity by constantly resisting patriarchal society
Genealogies
Lineages are masculine – through either an Arcadio or an Aureliano
Lineages are feminine – Nivea to Clara to Blanca to Alba
Narrative voice
The narrator is external, omniscient and male; and the writing of the book is symbolised by the magical male Melquíades
The family notebooks are kept by female writers, and all narration is intrinsic to the novel or internal
Identity
The repetition of names represents the confusion dominating the lives of characters
Characters have similar but different names because “repeated names sow confusion in notebooks that bear witness to life”
Style
The deadpan style plays up the use of tricks, illusions and a labyrinthine plot
The novel moves very quickly from the child’s-eye-view magic of young Clara to a matter-of-fact style that eventually achieves a powerful self effacing realism

26. Eva Luna
This, Allende’s third novel, was published 6 years after her first and moves beyond it in several ways:
The family saga and romance genres of House of the Spirits and Of Love and Shadows have been replaced by a free adaptation of the Spanish picaresque form
While seemingly located in an anonymous South American country, Allende has moved her socio-political setting from the Chile of her childhood and youth to the Venezuela of her adult exile
Though maintaining the feminist concerns of her earlier novels, Eva Luna comes closer to the magic realism of her male literary forebears than the political pragmatism to which House of the Spirits aspired.