Signs of Fiction and Existence: An Introduction
“I’m dead.” The first words of Yuri Herrera’s tale of an adolescent Mexican girl’s journey to the north transport us to what would appear to be her last words. Our beginning is her end as the ground falls out beneath her feet. Death, however, is only the first sign in Herrera’s 2009 novel, titled appropriately enough, Señales que precederán el fin del mundo [Signs Preceding the End of the World]. The end draws near.
Herrera’s novel is not unique. The final pages of César Aira’s 2001 novel, La villa [Shantytown], take readers to the heart of a storm—literal and figurative—of biblical proportions. Crime, punishment, and torrential rains threaten to wash away what remains—also literal and figurative—of Argentine civilization. In Evelio Rosero’s Los ejércitos (2007) [The Armies], a retired school teacher wanders his “town of peace” as it is slowly obliterated by competing factions in a civil war that, per government sources, isn’t happening. In other works, it isn’t towns destroyed or cities washed away, but souls crushed and hopes abandoned, as in Belén Gopeguí’s 2001 Lo real [The Real] or Wendy Guerra’s Todos se van [Everyone Leaves] (2006).
As we read the twenty-first-century novel, we find everywhere signs of an end.
Stories of course have always been about change. Sigmund Freud famously saw the most elementary of stories in his own grandson’s version of peek-a-boo. “Fort” and then “da,” the child gleefully exclaimed as that which was lost was found—over and over and over again. More recently, one theorist of the novel has proposed an opening moment of breakage as one of the genre’s defining tropes.1 Something snaps—a thing meets its end—and the story begins. Stories are about change. That is, about ends—and subsequent beginnings.
Typical human conversations are themselves replete with nostalgic recollections of “good old days” and observations that “they don’t make things like they used to.” Human beings are particularly drawn to apocalyptic moments. Death and destruction dominate news headlines, not because death and destruction are all there is, nor because such things most accurately describe reality, but because they sell. Day after day the world’s end draws near. Week after week experts inform us of the latest sign of the apocalypse. Cartoonist Matt Groening captures that obsession in his comic rendering of a character reading a book entitled, The End is Near: 50th Anniversary Edition.
The fact of the matter, of course, is that worlds are always ending. Political, economic, cultural, and social events constantly mark beginnings and ends. We organize our lives by wars and recessions, by social movements and symphony premiers, and by the changes in daily practices and worldviews they inspire, provoke, or require. We name generations and define cultural epochs.
Dates of the calendar serve similar purposes. We list the breakout artists of the past year, the great films of a decade, and the outstanding books of our century. With each ever-more expansive period of time, our thinking trends toward the more grave, if not the grave itself. In Christian Europe the year 1000 inspired end-of-the-world thinking. A millennium later, a more secularized society of erstwhile Christians spoke less of the end of times but still ended up stockpiling foodstuffs and weapons, this time against the threat of software failures. The more things changed, the more the end was still near.
So perhaps any story we tell about ends and beginnings is ultimately arbitrary. Yet if such ends are inevitably on the mind, then that mind will find ways of recording them. Ends and the sense-of-an-ending will find their way then into the stories we tell. After all, the stories we tell, tell about us.
This book is about the stories at a time of ending as told from the perspective of the Spanish-speaking world. In the first fifteen or so years of the twenty-first century a wealth of novelists writing tales set in the present or recent past record a series of events that mark ends for their protagonists and—not reading too much into the tales—the societies that give meaning to their existence. The ends are, as in the case of Rosero’s Los ejércitos, frequently violent. But sometimes, as in Gopeguí’s Lo real and Guerra’s Todos se van, they are more subtle, grounded not in war but in economic, political, or cultural conditions that slowly grind away at the utopian hopes that drive so many on despite the wealth of signs of an end.
Viewed as a whole, these multiple tales of the end serve as a broader sign of the end of a way of reading and understanding those very novels. In the following pages we will be reading these novels according to the signs they send. While we will loop back around to the signs of death, destruction, and apocalypse captured within the novels themselves, we will begin with the broader organizing principle which these novels demand. This will be our first sign for the end of a world.
The First Sign: Javier Meets Roberto
At what should be the climactic moment in Spaniard Javier Cercas’s best-selling 2001 novel Soldados de Salamina [Soldiers of Salamis], a prisoner stands before a firing squad. His end is not just near. It’s here. But when the shots are fired he finds himself miraculously still alive. He escapes into the woods. Minutes later, however, a soldier discovers him. The latter raises his gun. Once again, the end has arrived. But then, without giving a single word of explanation, the young soldier lowers his weapon, turns, and walks away.
The story of endings not quite realized is itself couched within a broader story of a failed writer at the end of his career. After years of trying, the novelist has conceded that his writer’s block is permanent. He will dedicate the rest of his life to mere journalism. But then an assignment brings hope and what he assumes will be a novel. Yet as we readers discover as we read that very novel within our novel, his attempt is uninspired and uninspiring. The writer’s block has not disappeared. What he has produced are mere words on a page. But then once more when all hope seems lost another assignment provides another lifeline, a way to finish his novel and again be a writer. Whereupon the suddenly energized novel races to its end.
For us readers, this tale of literary near endings may itself prove a kind of ending. For the tale is not just the story of a writer, but is the story of our writer, that is, of the person narrating the story to us. Moreover, this narrator bears a striking resemblance to the author whose name appears on the title page of the novel at hand—Javier Cercas—and who, even as we read, is enjoying actual royalties from our actual purchase of his book. We can’t help but wonder as we read if what we’re reading is fiction at all. Perhaps the writer’s block never went away—perhaps there’s nothing inventive here, just the real-life story of Cercas’s inability to invent. What is the nature of the tale being told, we ask. What is literature today when the literary phenomenon of the first decade of the twenty-first century in Spain feels most of the time like something other than literature—or at least what we’ve come to think of as literature?
But there is still one more ending to contend with. Soldados de Salamina is notable for its place at the beginning of a national obsession in Spain with unearthing the memory of its twentieth-century civil war. According to this reading, it is a decidedly Spanish book—national in its interests and national in its effects. And yet, a careful reading of Cercas’s work points to a decidedly nonnational moment, a moment, significantly, on which the entire tale—indeed the layers of tales just outlined—turn. That is the moment when the man on the firing squad is saved, when the literary career is resurrected, and when the fiction that feels nonfictional becomes once again fiction, if in a new, that is to say novel, form. And that moment is when the frustrated Spanish writer Javier Cercas, living in the would-not-be-Spanish region of Catalonia, meets the Chilean/Mexican expat Roberto Bolano, and they discover that, despite the differences we might expect from such varied national origins, they have so much in common.
It’s with that sign that we will begin.
Second Sign: ¿Por qué estás en San Juan?
Toward the end of Eduardo Lalo’s novel, Simone (2012), a debate breaks out between a celebrated Spanish novelist and two less-successful Puerto Rican counterparts. The Iberian is guest of honor at a gathering hosted by a local university professor carefully cultivating her own international reputation. The professor’s feting of the Iberian celebrity doesn’t fool the two locals. As fellow writers who have tried their own luck in the international literary marketplace, they know the real reason for the author’s presence at the party. And they’re not afraid to share it. “A ver, aclaremos el asunto. ¿Por qué estás en San Juan?” [Come on, let’s clear this up. Why are you here in San Juan?] (188), one of them asks. The Spaniard replies matter-of-factly that he’s there, of course, to present his novel. But how did you arrive? Who brought you here? the Puerto Rican insists.
The Spaniard concedes that his trip is underwritten by a publisher in collaboration with Spain’s Ministry of Culture. The Puerto Rican pounces: “O sea que nadie te invitó” [That is, nobody invited you] (188). He continues, “No me malinterpretes, a lo que voy es a una cuestión de hechos. Intento mostrar que no hubo un grupo de lectores fascinados por la obra de un exponente de la actual literatura española. Ni siquiera te trae aquí una universidad ni una institución cultural. Éstas no se vinculan directamente con tu presencia aquí” [Don’t misinterpret me; what I’m getting at is a question of facts. I’m trying to show that there was no group of readers fascinated by the Works of an exemplar of current Spanish literatura. It wasn’t even a university or a cultural institution that brought you here. They don’t have any direct connection with your presence here] (188). The Puerto Rican author goes on to explain that these foreign entities—at least to Puerto Rico and the rest of the Americas—promote and then flood the market with a limited version of what they call Hispanic culture. But this culture is really no more than the products of Spain itself, peppered with a handful of select authors and works from “las Indias.” The celebrated author, for all his literary talent, is here as a political and economic product.
Just before he’s tossed out of the party, the Puerto Rican gets in a final jab. Not at the author but at the system that has produced him: “Hoy España, más que una literatura, es una industria editorial” [Today Spain doesn’t have a literature; it has a publishing industry] (191).
The End of a World
For all our desire to identify with the down-and-out Puerto Rican and engage with a more “authentic” literature, we readers—be we Spanish, Puerto Rican, or Polish for that matter—may need to admit from the outset that today we are inevitably always consumers reading within the confines of “una industria editorial.” Readers can only consume what is available and they (we) do so within the contexts that the culture industry provides. If there’s a silver lining it is only that today the contexts are at long last expanding. Signs beginning around the turn of the twenty-first century suggest that if “Spanish” literature, per Lalo’s Puerto Rican critic, is ultimately the Spanish publishing industry, the definition of “Spanish” is at long last stretching beyond the geographic frontiers of the Iberian peninsula.
For decades most of us who studied “Spanish” literature were devotees, and arguably slaves, to the limited vision expressed by Spain’s “industria editorial.” To study “Spanish” literature was to read the literary production of Spain or, in academic-speak, to be a “peninsularist.” A student who wished to devote a career to reading Borges, García Márquez, or Lalo’s Simone, quickly learned that she or he would be studying to be something else, a “Latin Americanist.” Peninsularists over here. Latin Americanists over there. The division was rarely questioned. While a single introductory course taught the art of literary analysis through an indiscriminate mix of writers from across the Spanish-speaking world, what followed were more often than not three, five, or seven years of coursework carefully divided by an ocean. To this day, doctoral exams in some of North America’s most prestigious universities maintain this division. Generally the separation could be justified on grounds of subject matter and influences. With a handful of exceptions, during the period in which national literary traditions arose across Latin America, most Latin American writers simply didn’t rub shoulders with their Spanish counterparts. As students of the field then, whatever our early indiscriminate reading interests—in my case Borges and Cortazar as much as Martín Gaite and Martín Santos—we learned to stay in our lanes. Those lanes led to jobs—where similarly preordained curricular divisions awaited—then tenure, and finally promotion. Publication was similarly most easily procured through the increasingly narrow specializations that encouraged depth at the cost of breadth. Reading widely might have been fun, but it didn’t necessarily pay the bills.
Somewhere along the way, however, conditions began to change. In the 1990s some in the academy began speaking of transatlantic studies, introducing the possibility that one might read across the traditional divide and actually earn a degree. Job ads, however, continued—as they still mostly do today—to seek out “peninsularists” or “Latin Americanists” above all else, while university presses continued to organize collections along similar lines. Perhaps this was because overcoming divisions still felt artificial.
The truth of the matter was that even beyond the academy certain divisions continued to hold sway. In the 1980s and 1990s, readers of Spain’s leading literary journals and weekly cultural supplements could be forgiven for thinking the Spanish-language novel was limited to the product of Spain’s own writers. While one could certainly find reviews of the latest works from Latin America’s established elite—Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and other Boom-era cultural icons—reviews of new works in Spain’s leading cultural supplements (ABCD or Babelia, for example) were devoted almost exclusively to writers from Spain. Spanish readers appeared to make similar distinctions, as the weekly best-seller lists in these supplements also featured almost exclusively “peninsular” novels. Locals read locally, or at least nationally. Literary prizes were similarly separate. Spain’s most prestigious prizes, the Premio Nacional and Premio de la Crítica, were national prizes for national works. Even the publishing-house prizes, such as the Herralde, the Nadal, and the more commercial Planeta, were similarly devoted to writers who were also Spanish citizens. The peninsula for the peninsula (and its peninsularists).
In the mid-1990s, however, these distinctions began to collapse. The realm of literary prizes is illustrative. The Planeta Award, promoting peninsular fiction through annual awards to exclusively peninsular novels since 1952, fell to a Latin American novel in 1993. The author of the work, Mario Vargas Llosa, was, to be sure, one of the already consecrated, a holdover from the Boom era and so by this point arguably less Peruvian than global. However, in 1996 a Cuban writer of less global fame, Zoe Valdés, was named runner-up for the Planeta. This wasn’t just about Vargas Llosa. Maybe this was about Latin America. Over the next two decades another six Latin American writers walked home with Planeta prize money. While a mere six in two decades may not appear particularly impressive, it undoubtedly marks a change in taste and point of view from both publishers and readers associated with a prize very much central to Spain’s own national cultural heritage. The Planeta sells books, because as everyone in Spain “knows,” you need to read the Planeta.
If the Planeta awards mark a shift, the change of direction of the Premio Herralde is that much more impressive. The Herralde, arguably the most serious—at least in literary terms—of the Spanish publishing-house prizes, fell only once during the first thirteen years of its existence to a Latin American author. Then, beginning in 1997 and without any warning of change of approach from the prestigious Anagrama label, Latin American authors began taking the prize home quite regularly. Since 1997 exactly two-thirds of the awarded authors have come from Latin America. Moreover, the winning Latin American authors have hardly been household names (no Vargas Llosas on this list). Anagrama instead was taking chances on lesser-known writers from across the Spanish-speaking world, banking, apparently, that for their readership geo-political divisions had ceased to matter, or at least no longer determined their reading habits. Even the venerable Nadal in 2019 at long last fell to a Latin American, the relatively unknown Argentine author Guillermo Martínez.
Skeptics might scoff that these prizes aren’t serious, awarded as they are to unpublished works by the very multimedia corporations hoping to drum up interest and move more copy. The awards ceremonies are after all major media occasions, followed by weeks and sometimes months of marketing campaigns and book tours. But the very lack of literary seriousness, the very market nature of these prizes is proof of the point. Publishing houses like Planeta are not in the business of taking chances. They don’t market the unmarketable. It must be the case then that prize money is being doled out to a pan-Hispanic realm of novelists because the Spanish public is reading in a pan-Hispanic fashion. While it may be the case that, as Lalo’s Puerto Rican critic might argue, those broader postnational literary tastes are themselves the result of market manipulation, either way, the result is the same: a pan-Hispanic literary field is being forged. Spanish-language readers are reading Spanish-language novels, not just novels from their national traditions or from their respective sides of the Atlantic.
This collapse of borders wasn’t exclusive to Spain either. The prestigious Rómulo Gallegos prize, awarded every two years since 1967 by the government of Venezuela to outstanding Spanish-language novels, had for nearly three decades always fallen to Latin American works. Then in 1995 the prize fell to a Spaniard, Javier Marías. Six years later it fell again to a Spaniard and then again another four years on. While Spanish readers were looking one way across the Atlantic, Latin America readers were returning their gaze. The guardians at the gates of the most elite spaces of Spanish and Latin American culture were signaling the end of traditional cultural distinctions to each other, to their readers, and to the world.
While this sudden breakdown of distinctions might have caught casual prize-watching consumers by surprise, serious fiction readers would have seen this coming—even if all they were doing was reading fiction. Readers of Spaniards such as Javier Cercas and Enrique Vila Matas, the Mexican Sergio Pitol, and the Argentine Rómulo Gallegos winner, Mempo Giardinelli, would have found within the very pages of their novels evidence that the authors themselves were reading widely from across the Spanish-speaking world. As noted earlier, Cercas’s breakthrough novel, Soldados de Salamina (2001) is a story of writing failure saved at the last minute by the intervention of Chilean novelist, Roberto Bolaño, who, it is mentioned in passing, has read Cercas’s earlier, mostly ignored, novels. In other words, a Spaniard writing a Chilean reading a Spaniard. In Vila-Matas’s Herralde Prize-winning novel, El mal de Montaño (2002), the protagonist reads and sometimes interacts with a wide array of authors including the Mexican Pitol and the Argentine writers Ricardo Piglia (winner of Spain’s previously Spaniard-only Premio de la Critica) and Alan Pauls (winner of one of the more recent Herralde Prizes), in addition to fellow Spaniards Justo Navarro and Félix de Azúa, among others. While Pitol’s own novelistic memoir El arte de la fuga (1997) begins with interactions with Mexican intellectuals and discussions of Mexican authors, it soon moves beyond national borders to comment on the lives and works of a wide variety of Latin America’s canonical authors, and finally to consider those of authors from around the world. Along the way, Pitol’s alter ego interacts with Iberian contemporaries such as Vila-Matas, Azúa, and Navarro. Pitol notes as well his familiarity with Spanish publishing houses, discussing time spent at Seix Barral and Tusquets, while making particular note of interactions with his longtime friend Jorge Herralde, editor of Anagrama and namesake of the annual award. Meanwhile, Giardinelli devotes time in his novel, Fin de novela en Patagonia (2000), to discussing Chilean writer, Luis Sepulveda, who since 1997 has made his home in Spain, specifically, Gijón, Asturias.
Sepulveda’s Asturian residence brings us to the proverbial front door of a local Asturian writer, Xuan Bello, whose undefinable collection of stories, essays, poems, and dictionary entries, Paniceiros (2004), might best embody the pan-Hispanic turn in Spanish-language narrative of the twenty-first century. In Paniceiros, Bello pays frequent homage not just to a host of Latin American writers but to Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Camoes, and scores of other literary associates from across space and time. Nearly every story, set on the one hand in the deep space-time of the rural Asturias of Bello’s childhood, contains engaging references to an expansive literary world that transcends just about any geographic or temporal wall that any professor, book series, curriculum, or prize committee might attempt to erect. There is nothing pretentious or artificial about the combination. In the twenty-first century the most local of writers can be simultaneously cosmopolitan, indeed deeply and convincingly so.
A Spanish (Language) Republic of Letters
If we were to pay attention to recent scholarly trends, we might argue that Bello has his literary roots not merely in a pan-Hispanic tradition but in what has been called variously “World Literature” or the “World Republic of Letters.” The more common term, World Literature, originates with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German writer and statesman who in 1827 advocated moving our imaginations and reading habits beyond the limitations of a national literary tradition to embrace a Weltliteratur comprised of works spanning both geographical place and historical period. Wrote Goethe, “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. … I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”
To be appreciated, Goethe’s comments need to be read in their early nineteenth-century context. Such a reading will also help us understand how the old literary division between Spain and Latin American first arose. Several decades before Goethe declared himself a literary citizen of the world, an aesthetically less adventurous compatriot, Johann Gottfried Herder, had persuaded many a cultural elite, not to mention politicians and patriots, of the inseparability of the concepts of literature and nation. Herder was one of nationalism’s early advocates, and he imagined a key role for literature in promoting the concept of nation. Poetry, history, and language, he argued, were best understood as expressions of the volk and ought to be employed as tools for the promotion of national identity, which—no small matter—was the ultimate form of being. For him, nation, not humankind, was the great arbiter of value. Wrote Herder: “The savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species” (222).
With Herder’s ideas sweeping Europe, it became essential in the minds of both nineteenth-century politicians and professors to lay claim to a national literary legacy. Herder famously wrote, “A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.” In the age of nationalism, Herder’s impact was, not surprisingly, immediate and long-lasting. If the arts were once the patrimony and purchase of kings and counts, in the age of nations those works, once patronized and purchased, were now organized by nation-building elites for study, celebration, and education. Literature came to be understood as both a nation-building tool and a key to national understanding.
Over the same period, new literary forms arose that played perfectly, sometimes even conscientiously, into the hands of those who would forge a nation. Realist novelists—think Honore Balzac in France and Benito Pérez Galdós in Spain—invited readers to peer, as it were, into their neighbors’ parlors and down their burgeoning city’s back alleys to discover, comprehend, and then ally themselves with the growing political, economic, and social community in which they were immersed. The popularity of those same novels, in turn, produced a community of readers peering as if together into those same parlors and back alleys, forging a communal experience of jointly imagining their new national community.2
As these practices expanded and calcified, it was inevitable that national conceptions of literature would come to appear utterly natural. Galdós wasn’t just a writer from Spain, he was the great narrator of Spain, two times a national treasure. The same could be said—and was—of poets (José de Espronceda), playwrights (El Duque de Rivas), and painters (Eduardo Rosales). Herder’s claims, it appeared, had inspired their way into being: Spanish artistic production really was distinct. Pablo Casanova describes the result: “national literary histories were composed and taught in such a way that they became closed in upon themselves, having nothing in common… with their neighbors. From this came the belief that national traditions are fundamentally different. Indeed, their very periodizations rendered them incomparable and incommensurable” (105). The modern idea of literature thus arose hand in glove with the modern idea of political community. The concept of nation organized literature and, in turn, was partially comprised by that which it organized. The further the process proceeded, the more circular and self-feeding it became. Herder’s disciple, the American George Bancroft, captures the resulting conclusions, those that he and generations of intellectual elites and their students would follow: “The literature of a nation is national. Each [nation] bears in itself the standard of perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others” (Casanova 78). It should hardly be surprising then that even into the twenty-first century, “Our literary unconscious is largely national” and that “our instruments of analysis and evaluation”—that is, our classrooms, our literary prizes, and our bookstore shelves, among others—“are organized along national lines” (Casanova xi).
It was against this nationistic rhetoric and its calcifying effects that Goethe, apparently a more omnivorous reader (and perhaps simply a more careful thinker) than Herder, promoted his notion of Weltliteratur. Goethe, alas, was clearly ahead of his time. Herder’s nationalist point of view carried the day in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues to shape reading and educational habits into our new millennium.
Today, however, as we have seen in the case of Spain’s literary prizes, a broader conception of literary traditions is no longer the dream of an isolated German thinker, but increasingly the reality of every reader. While Goethe’s arguments ran up against the great nationalization movements of the nineteenth-century, today’s reader peruses book shelves in a postnational world. Despite the populist retrenchment of the last few years, experts agree that in general the world has entered a global era. Current-affairs books from the first two decades of the twenty-first century announced the move beyond the old international order with such titles as The End of the Nation-State, The Post-American World, and No One’s World. Myriad titles celebrated a new global order and a borderless world: One World, The Great Convergence, and The World is Flat, among so many.
In this light, it isn’t surprising that after nearly two centuries Goethe’s ideas have suddenly found new advocates. Pablo Casanova, in his book, The World Republic of Letters, calls today for the rediscovery of “a lost transnational dimension to literature” (xi). Casanova, prefers the term World Republic of Letters to Goethe’s World Literature, arguing that the former invites us to imagine an “international literary space” as opposed to a mere list of works and authors (xii). The concept of a literary space may owe something to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of “fields of cultural production.” Boudieu imagines literary works and their authors as inhabiting cultural fields, or what we might view as structured spaces situated within larger political economies but with laws of functioning that often defy traditional economic or political logic (quick commercial success as the enemy of literary consecration, to name the most obvious example). Within these fields agents (authors, editors, critics, etc.) jostle for power, or “symbolic capital,” via recognition, prestige, and, ultimately, canonization. Such fields can exist on a variety of levels: local fields are embedded in national fields which are in turn embedded in global, or, to return to Casanova, “world” fields. For Casanova, the latter field takes shape today around an expanding group of writers who have managed to escape nationalistic cultural confines and carve out for themselves new transnational literary spaces, “to invent their literary freedom, which is to say the conditions of the autonomy of their work” (Casanova xiii).
A key point from Casanova’s concept—and one which returns us to our consideration of the broadening of the field of Spanish-language letters first illustrated in the arguments of Lalo’s frustrated Puerto Rican novelist—is the role of local pressures impinging on writers hoping to free themselves of national strictures and enjoy “world” status. He quotes Mexican writer Octavio Paz to illustrate the complexity of transcending national status. Paz reflects, “My classics are those of my language. I consider myself to be a descendant of Lope and Quevedo, as any Spanish writer would” (85). Paz, in other words, is more than a Mexican writer; his own intellectual formation—dating from the early twentieth century—was not national. It was, rather, language-based. Paz read great writing in his language, the Castilian tongue of central Spain that most of the world refers to as Spanish. But then Paz drops his bomb: “Yet I am not a Spaniard” (85). Paz would transcend national boundaries if he could. He reads beyond his national (Mexican) or continental (Latin American) tradition. Paz is a contemporary of the Latin American Boom novelists who at last put Latin American literature on international reading maps and were celebrated locally for embodying what Argentine critic Angel Rama called “transculturation.” For Rama, these writers were the culmination of a Latin American tradition of cultural eclecticism, conscientiously combining local traditions and the literary techniques of Western modernization to produce a new kind of writing (27). For Rama, those local traditions themselves arose out of a rich mix of influences, from the oft-rejected traditions of their Spanish and Portuguese colonizers to the just-as-frequently dismissed experiences of Latin America’s indigenous, African, and immigrant “others” (3). And yet despite inheriting five centuries of cultural mixing, despite writing from within a tradition characterized by what Rama calls a “restless and romantic yearning” to be part of an international culture, Paz, as late as the mid-twentieth century still feels restricted by it.
Perhaps this was because, even if Paz had been able to escape his national prison, a linguistic one waited. The Guatemalan intellectual Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927), today mostly forgotten but the author of more than eighty books in a variety of genres and a prominent personality in the Paris of his day, explains, “For a writer who is the least bit universal-minded, the Spanish language is a prison. We can pile up volumes, even find readers, it’s exactly as though we had written nothing: our voice doesn’t carry beyond the bars of our cage!” (Casanova 184). Gómez Carrillo knew intimately of what he spoke. While writing prolifically in Spanish, he did so most of his life from France. He knew the territory—Bourdieu’s field of cultural production, we might say—including understanding quite clearly the peripheral space he occupied therein. Yet despite such understanding and a certain literary success in his lifetime, Gomez Carrillo is today mostly forgotten. His burden was double. A Spanish-language speaker but not a Spanish citizen. He was a writer without a proper literary nation and therefore, today, hardly a writer.
Returning to Paz, few would exclude the Mexican poet and essayist from the handful of Latin American writers who would have been read and whose names would have been readily recognized beyond their national borders in their lifetimes (my one personal interaction with him came not in Mexico but during a poetry reading in the early 1990s at Spain’s Residencia de Estudiantes where he was clearly a venerated figure). While eventually acquiring an international reputation, Paz experienced the challenge any writer from the periphery faces in his quest to be considered fully a part of broader linguistic traditions. In other words, if national boundaries hamper “world” status—a Spaniard whose writings might be considered too “Spanish” to be considered in the “World Literature” pantheon—at least those boundaries constitute a tradition. Paz—like Lalo’s Puerto Rican novelist—didn’t even enjoy that. Casanova explains that the concept of national literatures most benefited—and may continue to benefit—writers from states with strong traditions rooted in the concepts of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalist movements that Herder championed. England, Germany, and France are clear frontrunners here. If Spain is second tier, it certainly features more prominently in the pantheon of national literatures than Paz’s Mexico or any of the other Latin American nations that spent the nineteenth century not forging a sense of a nation but struggling to establish the most elementary of political processes when not simply staving off foreign invasion. Not for nothing has the key division in Spanish-language literature been that between Spain (a nation—or at least a state with a literary tradition that could be called “national”) and Spanish America (a linguistic community comprising everyone else who wasn’t born in, wrote from, and died within the former). Paz, in a literary sense, was nationless. This is not to say that there is no particularly Mexican or Argentine literary tradition, but only that such traditions historically lacked the cultural (to say nothing of economic) depth and breadth necessary to launch their writers as easily beyond local borders as those of their European counterparts.
Border-free Literature for a Borderless World
And yet, in an ironic twist of fate, in today’s increasingly global world, nationlessness may at last be more boon than burden.3 Local fields of cultural production—or local republics of letters, to use Casanova’s term—are always embedded in broader national, regional, and possibly global fields. For example, Latin American literature was traditionally positioned on the periphery of the Spanish-language literary field (where the young Paz found himself), which itself remained emplaced in a broader field of global cultural production, a world republic of letters. A century ago that was a double burden. But today Latin America’s peripheral situation with respect to Spanish letters may allow local artists to skirt the very notion of national literatures, leaping past “national” categories to occupy much more directly a space within the center of a burgeoning world literature. Certainly as early as the “Boom” novels of the 1960s, García Márquez, Cortázar, and company were seen—or at least advertised—as part of a Latin American phenomenon, which made them easier to market than if they had been viewed as distinctly Colombian or Argentine. Free of the bonds of national tradition, they could be read more easily as universal.
Excellent translation into English and other major languages played a major role in this leap and is for a prominent theorist of “World Literature,” David Damrosch, a key factor in the construction of the designation itself. More recently, translation has allowed writers such as the Spaniard Javier Marías to bypass altogether what should be by birthright his national literary space. Marías, while not unknown within his Spanish homeland, became a celebrated novelist there only after translations of his novels in English, French, and especially German made him an international sensation. Enrique Vila-Matas, Julián Ríos, and Juan Goytisolo are other Spaniards with international reputations that have typically eclipsed their national ones. Roberto Bolaño was a second-tier figure on Latin American literary maps until English translations of The Savage Detectives and then 2666 made him required reading for cosmopolitans across the globe. More recently, the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli hasn’t even bothered to await translation, writing some of her works directly in English. She will not suffer the fate of her compatriot predecessor Paz nor of the forgotten Guatemalan Gómez Carrillo. Neither nation nor language will pin her down.
The literary magazine Granta’s issue introducing readers to “The Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists” shows the power to break down literary boundaries of a well-done, widely disseminated translation. The anthology, making no distinction between Latin American and peninsular writers, to say nothing of the separate nations within Latin American, provided English-speaking readers with their first glimpse of the writing of many of the above-named authors whose novels can be found today in English-language editions in online bookstores across the globe. These booksellers themselves appear uninterested in national or even regional distinctions and so, in the way they present these authors, only further encourage the collapse of traditional borders.
Online bookseller Amazon, due to its almost monopolistic size, provides the most obvious starting place for illustrating the border collapse. For better or worse, Amazon shopping is driven not by nation-building patriots but by algorithms designed to encourage book sales: you search for a title, and the algorithm suggests similar works you might also enjoy (and hopefully purchase). So what happens when an English speaker searches Amazon for a contemporary novel from Spain, say a translation of Vila-Matas’s Mal de Montaño (Montano’s Malady)? Where else will the algorithm point? In a recent test run, I find a link to a recent work by another Spanish author, Agustín Fernández Mallo. But I also find links—just as prominently displayed—to novels by the Argentine Rodrigo Fresán as well as works by other European writers: France’s Mathias Enard and Switzerland’s Robert Walser among others. The only reason I know the nationalities of these authors is because I look them up. Amazon doesn’t tell me. And if I continue following the threads that Amazon’s algorithms recommend? Clicking on Fresán’s novel links me to his fellow Argentine Ricardo Piglia but also to the aforementioned Mexican/American Luiselli, as well as to the Chilean Roberto Bolaño and the Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez, plus another dozen or so writers from non-English speaking countries. In this particular search, by the way, no novelist from Spain appears.
While it is true that to a large extent the now multinational Spanish publishing houses still determine who gets published, if the published authors can garner sufficient international recognition to merit a quality English-language translation, the Amazon test case shows that any peninsular hegemony quickly collapses. There is, to be sure, a big “if” in that process, but the fact remains that in yet another marketplace, that of the increasingly dominant internet, traditional cultural geographies are disappearing.
As a result, Latin American literature today is no longer a handful of “Boom” novelists (Córtazar, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and perhaps one or two others, depending on who is drawing up the list). Today English-only readers of recent fiction translated from the Spanish could name at least two to three dozen Latin American fiction writers. Once again turning to Amazon, we find in readily available English translations the still active Vargas Llosa and the late but still highly influential Roberto Bolaño. Isabel Allende continues to top best-seller lists far beyond her native Chile. After these big three come dozens. From Argentina we find established writers like Luisa Valenzuela, Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer, César Aira, and Mempo Giardinelli, joined by slightly newer writers like Rodrigo Fresán, Samanta Schweblin, Iosi Havilio, Sergio Chjfec, and Roque Larraquy. From Chile, Amazon offers us the works of Alberto Fuguet, Diamela Eltit, Lina Meruane, Pedro Lemebel, Carla Guelfenbein, Marcela Serrano, and Alejandro Zambra. From Mexico hail Jorge Volpi, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Elena Poniatowska, Juan Villoro, Carmen Boullosa, Yuri Herrera, Guadalupe Nettel, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Chloe Aridjis, Mario Bellatin, Daniel Saldaña París, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, and Valeria Luiselli. Colombians Laura Restrepo, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Franco, and Evelio Rosero now join the late Gabriel García Márquez on contemporary reading lists of the globally informed. From Venezuela come Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Victoria de Stefano, Ana Teresa Torres; from Central America Horacio Castellanos Moya, Claribel Alegría, and Rodrigo Rey Rosa; from Uruguay, Christina Peri Rossi and Carmen Posadas; and from Peru, Santiago Roncagliolo and Alonso Cueto. Caribbean writers such as Leonardo Padura, Mayra Montero, Eduardo Lalo, Achy Obejas, Wendy Guerra, and Mayra Santos-Febres round out our list. Surely I have missed a significant handful. But this is the point. There are simply too many to keep track of, much less focus on. And this list merely features those authors whose work is currently available in English editions and whose names I find in a single session seated in front of my computer staring at the Amazon webpage.
But, of course, that’s Amazon. What about the more local booksellers—the ones selling from Spain, Mexico, or Argentina to stick with the biggest and selling almost entirely to fellow Spaniards, Mexicans, or Argentines? Does the collapse of national boundaries seen on Amazon sustain itself in other settings? Per the logic of Pierre Bourdieu’s fields of cultural production and per the arguments of Eduardo Lalo’s disgruntled Puerto Rican novelist, we should expect significantly more division, more erecting of borders. The sellers are promoting products that in general are less universally marketable, and they need to make sales. On the local level, marketing the local makes sense. How else to compete against the globalized behemoths? And yet, in recent years the major brick-and-mortar bookstores in downtown Madrid have been eliminating distinctions. To be sure, they still mostly separate Spanish-language literature from world literature in general, but the previously ironclad separation of Spanish from Latin American fiction has disappeared from the shelves of such major vendors as La Central, FNAC, and Espasa-Calpe’s venerable Casa del Libro. Has Latin America followed suit? Here the logic of cultural fields and economic fields still holds; a recent visit to bookstores in downtown Buenos Aires found multiple venues still separating out Argentine fiction from the rest of Spanish-language literature, but the latter was itself occasionally combined with world literature as a whole.
And online? The first thing we note is that here we’re likely comparing apples and oranges. Amazon is a behemoth able to hire the best and brightest programmers to design webpages and algorithms that, simply put, churn up more information. Searches for just about any English translation of Spanish-language novels on our list generate dozens of recommendations. In comparison, Spain’s Casa del Libro website, casadellibro.com, provides only five additional recommendations per book search. Mexico’s Libreria Porrúa offers a mere one or two, and these are typically works by the same author. Another significant Mexican online bookseller, Librerías Gandhi, provides suggestions that appear to follow no logic at all. Argentina’s Liberería Santa Fe’s suggestions range from one to four additional novels and appear to follow no artificial algorithm but rather register the actual purchases of real customers. More well-known works typically elicit four recommendations. More obscure works get three, two, one, or even none.
All that being said, what do we find? Is there evidence of less-nationally focused reading habits (or at least less-nationally focused marketing)? In the case of Spain’s Casa del Libro—with its five recommendations for every search—certain nationalistic or regional/continental tendencies continue to hold. A search for the latest Javier Marías novel generates recommendations for fellow Spaniards Juan José Millás and Arturo Pérez Reverte, in addition to other works by Marías. There are no Latin Americans, to say nothing of works from non-Spanish-language writers, those with whom Marías is so frequently associated. A search for Ricardo Piglia’s latest writing doesn’t generate more Argentines (other than works by Piglia himself) but Latin Americans: García Márquez and Mexico’s Juan José Arreola. More interesting results arise, however, when searching for less canonical authors. A search for the Spaniard Belén Gopegui generates a contemporary Japanese novelist among others. A search for Vila-Matas’s latest work generates recommendations for North American novelists. Searches for César Aira and Evelio Rosero bring up recommendations for works by Japanese, Swiss, French, Danish, German, Welsh, and Spanish novelists. Searches on Argentina’s Librería Santa Fe website are even more interesting (remember that these recommendations appear to reflect actual reader purchases). A quick search for a César Aira novel shows readers viewing novels by the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, the Salvadoran Horacio Castellanos Moya, and the Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas. A search for the aforementioned Marías generates suggestions of English, Cuban, and Swedish authors, while a search for Javier Cercas brings up American, French, and Spanish writers; a Uruguayan author generates recommendations from Argentina, Canada, and Italy. Clearly Argentine readers, at least those purchasing books from Librería Santa Fe, show little apparent respect for national boundaries.
Simply put, with regards to the contemporary novel written from the Spanish-speaking world, national distinctions appear increasingly difficult to justify. Readers, prizes, publishers, bookstores—both brick-and-mortar and online—and literary supplements all signal a sea change in the way literature is being read in the twenty-first century. Now to be sure, if we seek insight into issues of national importance—evolving attitudes toward Spain’s civil war, Argentina’s Dirty War, or Colombia’s “Violencia,” to name three prominent examples—then organizing our reading along national lines continues to make sense. But any clear-eyed study of general directions in Spanish-language fiction today must transcend political borders. If our object of concern is the literature per se, do the old distinctions between “peninsularists” and “Latin Americanists” any longer make sense? Shouldn’t we instead be speaking simply of Spanish-language or Hispanic fiction?
No More Walls?
If this is the case, however, doesn’t it follow that we should no longer speak of Hispanic fiction but rather of Goethe’s Weltliteratur or Casanova’s “World Republic of Letters.” As we have seen with some of our online searches, this logic holds true at least for specific works and authors. There are indeed writers who, as Casanova points out, position themselves outside their national or even linguistic literary traditions. The previously mentioned Javier Marías is a case in point. First achieving elite literary status thanks to translations of his work, Marías has used that celebrity to frequent the company of a global cultural elite beyond the reach of most of his fellow Spanish-language authors. For example, the English novelist A. S. Byatt, the American architect Frank Gehry, and the Turkish Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk, not to mention the French proponent of the concept of “fields of cultural production,” Pierre Bourdieu, among many others figure among those invited to join a virtual aristocracy he has organized around a “kingdom” he wrote into existence. But Marías’s case places him, per Casanova’s own reckoning, in a rather select group, writers privileged to travel enjoying advanced skills in other languages. Marías is, in fact, an award-winning translator of Thomas Hardy, Laurence Sterne, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Faulkner among others.
Most Spanish-language novelists don’t enjoy Marías’s advantages and would rarely if ever find themselves recognized by a modern-day Goethe or occupying spaces in Casanova’s World Republic of Letters. Within a Spanish-language Republic of Letters, however, they certainly feature. This is, again, upheld by the nature of the literary prizes reviewed above as well as by the content of the novels themselves. Bolaño—a clear denizen of the World Republic of Letters—is able to save a novel by Javier Cercas—a Spanish novelist who at the time hardly enjoyed a similar reputation—because, sharing the same language, the two writers frequent the same venues and read the same authors in the original language. And while the aforementioned Vila-Matas and Pitol have plenty of friends beyond the Spanish-speaking world, the lion’s share of attention in their novels still goes to the writers with whom they share a language and thus with whom they regularly interact, writers whose daily or weekly columns they read and whose unpublished works they share. We can be certain, then, that of the more than four dozen writers named earlier, all would surely feature in a Spanish-language Republic of Letters, while a much smaller number would make a world literature list. Clearly, despite rapidly disappearing borders and increasing numbers of translations, a Spanish-language focus still makes sense and a Spanish-language Republic of Letters can be said to exist. Within that republic, “the literary homeland,” as the editors of the aforementioned Granta anthology put it, “is the language itself.”
It is this homeland that the frustrated writer Javier and his interlocutor, Roberto Bolaño, inhabit in Soldados de Salamina. And it’s over the structure and logic of this homeland that the Puerto Rican authors and their Spanish guest debate in Simone. Each of these five characters are actors within and—as alter egos of flesh-and-blood authors—virtual actants upon a Spanish-language republic of letters in which their respective positionality and movement have distinctive effects upon those of the rest. The Catalonia-based Spaniard Javier needs the Catalanized-Mexican-Chilean Bolaño. The Puerto Rican writers and their Spanish counterpart argue so intensely because they share a common space worth arguing over.
Stepping outside the text for a moment, in the extraliterary world of real life, the flesh-and-blood authors of the two novels in question prove the value of that play. Lalo may have his alter ego protagonist complain aloud about traditional injustices in the Spanish-language publishing world, but such realities didn’t impede the very novel in which they are registered from garnering Lalo the Romulo Gallegos prize and getting his novel onto the shelves of bookstores across the Spanish-speaking world, including Spain. Cercas’s success across that same world has been equally remarkable. In this fashion, both of these novels signal a literary sea change. They are signs simultaneously of the end of an old literary world and of the possibility of a new one to come.
More Signs: The Novel, Perhaps
But would that new one come in a novel? For over a century experts from José Ortega y Gasset to Walter Benjamin and from Roland Barthes to John Barth prophesied “the death of the novel.” The end was near, they claimed, for the genre that had embodied modernity. The world was changing and newer generations demanded stories more brightly and briefly packaged. Words on the page were suddenly running a distant second, third, or even fourth in storytelling popularity to sights, sounds, and special effects of newer narrative technologies. Against film, television, and Youtube videos, how could the lengthy time- and attention-demanding novel survive?
In some ways it hasn’t. Certainly we can still purchase and read stories generally categorized as novels. But the way those novels work has changed. To be sure, the novel has long been recognized as the most anarchic and omnivorous of genres, the form that defies formal strictures, that can absorb all others—to the point that the novel may cease to be a novel or at least what we expect it to be. In the two cases with which we began this study, we see this illustrated. Both Soldados de Salamina and Simone challenge readers’ most foundational assumptions of what a novel is, not merely by mixing the fictional with the nonfictional, but by structurally collapsing the distance between flesh-and-blood author and their novels’ narrators, producing an effect that has recently been named autofiction, as we will see in chapter eight. But these autofictions are only part of a broader collapsing in contemporary fiction of traditional distinctions between truth and fantasy, fiction and reality. Cercas’s novel, like Lalo’s, is an explicit autofiction—a novel about a blocked writer who shares all the qualities with the flesh-and-blood author of the novel we are reading. At the same time, the character who saves the writer from his writer’s block is named Roberto Bolaño, a character who obviously refers to the flesh-and-blood writer who, at the time of the writing of Soldados, had recently penned his own novel (The Savage Detectives) that showed little interest in distinguishing between the real and the imagined. There are no autofictional games in Bolaño’s novel, and yet readers familiar with Bolaño’s life will have a hard time separating that life from the tale at hand. The Savage Detectives, along with his 2004 novel, 2666, would make Bolaño the toast of the town in high literary circles of the early twenty-first century. Neither were traditional fictions.
But is this really a sign of an end? Aren’t we merely witnessing yet another return of the metafictional games that have accompanied the evolution of fiction since its inception?4 If the first modern novel is Cervantes’s Don Quijote, as is often claimed, then self-conscious storytelling with its playful commentary on the art of narration and its repeated breaking of the fourth wall are simply part of the DNA of the genre. But this ignores how the experience of metafiction actually works. When an episode of Don Quijote (or Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for that matter) ends abruptly because the narrator has lost the manuscript (or suffered a sudden heart attack), we feel as if the borders between fiction and reality have been erased. Instead, it’s actually quite the opposite. Everything in these episodes—both what we view as make believe and what we imagine entering from the real world—remains neatly within the fictional realm, though now, in fact, the latter has expanded to encompass what feels like the nonfictional. Metafictional moments, then, invite us into the world of fiction, but they themselves don’t leave that realm. Much recent fiction, on the other hand, can’t welcome us into that fictional space because they don’t fully occupy it to begin with. For example, unless I am either a personal friend of Javier Cercas or engage in some serious research on the author, it is impossible for me as an average reader to separate the fictional from the nonfictional Javier as I read his novel. In fact, a little research will likely produce only further confusion as I discover how much of what he’s narrating is indeed factual. The same goes for the works of Lalo and Bolaño. Instead of pulling me into their fictional realm, they narrate as if from the nonfictional world itself, a place I already inhabit.
Bolaño, Cercas, and Lalo are, of course, not alone. Javier Marías’s mammoth Tú rostro mañana was one of the literary revelations of the early twenty-first century. Large passages of the three-volume work are lifted straight from Marías’s life or that of his family. In the following pages we will consider the autofictions of the Argentine Patricio Pron, of the Chilean Alejandro Zambra, and of Cercas. But we’ll also examine a kind of diary, penned by Cuba’s Wendy Guerra, and what may be read as a series of essays, memories, and commentary written by the Asturian Xuan Bello. Perhaps most challenging and captivating of all is the Argentine César Aira’s novel La villa. Aira is known for tales that appear lifted from childhood memory (Cómo me hice monja, for example). While La villa, in contrast, is clearly invented, it bears the marks of an author no longer concerned with policing the borders between truth and invention: the facts of the tale may be pure invention, but the telling feels real, shed of certain key tropes we traditionally associate with literature. Argentine literary critic Josefina Ludmer has Aira, among others, in mind when she speaks of what she calls the “Postautonomous Literature” of our contemporary moment. “These writings don’t permit literary interpretations,” she writes, “in other words it ceases to matter whether they’re literature or whether that even matters. And it doesn’t matter either if they’re reality or fiction. From a local, quotidian reality they ‘construct their present’ which is precisely their raison d’etre” (1, trans. mine). While not all novels worth reading fit this designation, enough do that we must acknowledge a sea change in the nature of fiction in the new millennium. In this sense, we can speak of these novels yet again as signs of an end.
Perhaps we might suppose these are fictions of and for a post-truth era. In a world where science and expertise are regularly questioned, where bad news is frequently declared “fake,” where people’s sense of reality is shaped by bias-affirming algorithms, and where video and voice technology increasingly erode trust in just about anything and everything we see and hear, the distance between the “truths” of fiction and material fact collapse. When seeing is no longer believing, the communicative playing field becomes leveled. In such a milieux, old arguments about the value of literature or the death of the novel may no longer matter.
Even so, before embarking on two hundred or so pages of reading about literature, it might be worth our time to step back and entertain the question of the value of literature itself once more. Does literature matter? Why do we care at this moment to consider the novel? Assuming real, factual truth can still be ascertained in our postmodern, post-truth world, can the “truths” of fiction hold any kind of a candle to the truths of empirically verifiable facts and figures?
To answer that question, we turn to the Visigoths.
Visigothic Dogs or the Question of Literature
If at this point you find yourself asking just who exactly are the Visigoths that would be precisely the point. A quick internet search reveals that the Visigoths were a Germanic tribe who, from the fifth century to the eighth century C.E., became the principal political force in the territory that today we call Spain. They became that by filling a void left after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The Visigoths did so with the blessing of the former occupiers, who invited them in with hopes that they might maintain some semblance of order in the face of invasions by other Germanic tribes. Thanks to their role as Rome’s legitimate heirs, plus the fact that they provided the united people of the Iberian peninsula their first kings, future generations would come to view the Visigoths in mythic terms. Future nineteenth-century historians, in particular, eager to forge a modern, national identity for Spain, would celebrate these Germanic peoples as the first great “Spaniards.”
And yet, most of us don’t know who they are. Why? Because neither do Spaniards. This lack of knowledge isn’t a result of a lack of archeological treasure or historical data. Major tomes have been written on the Visigoths by some of Spain’s most acclaimed historians (Menéndez Pidal and Sánchez-Albornoz to name just two). The lack of knowledge stems, instead, from the fact that the Visigoths left no literature.
Julián Marías, one of Spain’s most important intellectual voices of the twentieth century and father of the aforementioned novelist Javier Marías, elaborates: “The most fascinating aspect of the Visigothic era … is that, despite a wealth of data, we’re ultimately unable to understand it, we are unable to imagine life in the Spain of that remote moment” (88, trans. mine). “The cause of this,” writes Marías, “is the period’s lack of works of fiction” (88). Without access to a literary tradition, he explains, we are ultimately unable to piece together an era’s “way of life” (88). “Fiction—poetry, theater, narrative,” explains Marías, “invents characters and gives them life; it must reconstruct their circumstances, it must make their lives believable and thus intelligible. In other words, it must reconstruct that world in which their lives would have been possible” (88–89). According to Marías it is not archeological digs or historical documents but the fiction produced by the society under investigation that makes it fully comprehensible to contemporary audiences. Thanks to literature—not their numerous ruins—other periods of the history of Spain—including those predating the Visigoths—feel familiar to us. But couched in between these civilizations remains the mystery of a Germanic tribe that left no creative fiction. “The absence of [Visigothic] literature,” Marías concludes, “is the principal reason for [the period’s] obscurity” (89).
In Marías’s important clarification we find powerful support for what has often been the second most basic of all arguments for literature (the first being the case for pleasure, pure and simple). Well-told fictional stories explain the alien world to us better than possibly anything else available. Stories open windows onto other societies and their cultures. Through stories we may enjoy a glimpse into what life was like both a long time ago and in places far, far away. Ancient ruins and artifacts may inspire a wealth of scholarly speculation about some lost civilization and may shine light onto its way of life, onto the daily practices of its people, and perhaps onto the diseases, violence, or environmental challenges that eventually wiped it out. But without that civilization’s stories, we are forever unable to speak with confidence about how things really were for the people. How did the citizens live? What were their hopes and dreams? What were their daily practices and their sacred rituals? How did they fall in and out of love? What were the objects of their derision? What inspired their heartiest laughter and their bitterest tears? What monsters, demons, and enemies did they fear? At what windmills did they tilt and for what were they willing to die? Without the stories belonging to those lost times and places, we have artifacts but little understanding. Consequently, even those who should know better end up telling us to move on. We study the Romans and marvel at Al-Andalus. But we only mention the Visigoths. Artifacts without fiction to enliven our understanding via the spark of imagination leave us cold. Without literature, the past fades away.
Ironically, some of literature’s most important voices have occasionally been misread to appear to discourage such uses of literature. Roland Barthes, the influential mid-twentieth-century French structuralist, showed through readings of Flaubert and Michelet, how the sense of reality produced in their classic works is merely an effect of language and, moreover, one with little connection to the heart of the literary matter, i.e. the process of moving the story forward through time. When we read Madame Bovary we think we’re getting an accurate taste of nineteenth-century French life. But Barthes shows that all we’re seeing are a series of cleverly placed images constructed out of words that aren’t even directly tied to the story supposedly being told. More damning still is Barthes’s connection between this literary device and historical writing. Historians are themselves storytellers and use the same narrative devices as novelists to construct an illusion of portraying a historical reality. We readers, in turn, read the histories as if the effects created by the words on the paper were unproblematic, straightforward representations of reality. We assume uncritically that what we read is what was. But Barthes shows that any representation—literary or historical—is always finally a construct. There is no true historical vision of the Romans awaiting you as you open Apuleius’s tale of the golden ass. There is no mid-nineteenth-century French countryside laid out before the reader in Flaubert’s account of Charles and Madame Bovary’s ill-fated marriage. Even if we were to find a long-lost Visigothic tale of Visigothic love in the time of Visigothic civil war, according to Barthes, it wouldn’t be real.
In the post-Barthes world, the conclusion for many literature professors and their hapless students has appeared clear: stop reading literature for information. Stick with studying the construct. Our interest should be form, not content; the writing, not its author.
So is Marías wrong about the Visigoths?
The Language of Literature: Evidence of Life on Earth
Literary theorist Derrick Attridge may provide some assistance in bridging the Marías-Barthes divide. Attridge clarifies that the fallacy Barthes identifies is utterly natural: “The experience of immediacy and vividness which we often gain from literary works of the past leads naturally to their being pressed into service as a source of evidence for lives led before ours or in foreign places” (7). At the same time Attridge warns us: “There is a danger that the ‘reality effect,’ the created illusion of a real reference, may interfere with as much as it aids accurate historical and human judgment” (7). But, he continues, “The judicious use of literary evidence is clearly as valid as other modes of access to a vanished or otherwise inaccessible culture” (7). He does caution us, per Barthes, that the degree to which we readers commit the error of confusing literature’s (or language’s) reality effect for historical reality is “alarming” (8). So we must proceed with care.
Returning to Marías’s comment on the Visigoths, let us note his explanation that literature is the medium that opens unknown worlds to us. It does not describe nor explain those worlds, let alone present them. We might say that literature can’t actually describe any world because literature doesn’t actually talk about that world. At least not the world per se. Literature’s power to open up distant times and places to its readers is not a consequence of the way it talks about those times and places. In fact, in an ironic twist, it is able to open up worlds only because it does not actually talk about those worlds at all!
To understand this, it’s helpful to begin by thinking about literature’s medium, language. Many imagine language to be a symbolic system that expresses, at its most basic level, very concrete things. “That thing over there is a dog,” or “I’m cold.” Language refers to things—that dog, the cold. It’s referential. If we think about it a bit more we’ll probably also agree that language can do more than merely refer: for example, “I have a dog” (you can’t see it right now, but trust me, I do) or “I used to be cold” (a past that you can only imagine but never verify). In both cases I still may be referring to something. Now, however, that thing isn’t concrete and, in fact, may not actually exist (I may not have a dog—I wish I didn’t—but I do; it’s my children’s).
To drive our point home, we could continue producing increasingly abstract dogs and cold weather scenarios—future dogs, desired cold, conditional dogs out in the cold, etc. For now suffice it to say that language, while appearing to be referential, is, in practice, rarely so. At least not so in any direct way. Language actually functions more by way of connections among signs (I understand cold more through contrast to the linguistic and finally mental concept of hot, and so on, than through connections between signs and their actual referents.)
When we take such nonreferential language to its extreme, we arrive at what we call literature. After all, literature describes what is always, finally, a fictional world. Hence literary language can never be said to refer to any kind of concrete, material reality. Literary language does not refer. Literature shows, in the words of J. Hillis Miller, the “extraordinary power of words to go on signifying in the total absence of any phenomenal referent” (16). Miller continues, “The words of a literary work do not transcend themselves toward the phenomenal things to which they refer;” rather, “The whole power of literature is there in the simplest word or sentence used in this fictitious way… Words used as signifiers without referents generate with amazing ease people with subjectivities, things, places, actions, all the paraphernalia of poems, plays, and novels with which adept readers are familiar” (16). Hence Miller concludes: “Literature derails or suspends or redirects the normal referentiality of language. Language in literature is derouted so that it refers only to an imaginary world” (20, emphasis mine).
But this, ironically, is where its power to make us believe in the worlds it invites us to inhabit begins. In order to create a sense of reality, literature places the burden of meaning entirely on a signifying system. Literature’s reader has no direct recourse to a referential one. Thus the signifying system only takes the shape of a story—and of the reality it describes—as the system is conceptually organized by the reader. Such organization demands the activation of the reader’s mental and imaginative faculties. It insists on engagement. This is even more the case when we consider how much more creative literary language tends to be. For Jonathan Culler literature is “the most complex account of signification we possess.” Literature “turns back on itself and examines, parodies, or treats ironically its own signifying procedures” (242). Not only is literary language nonreferential; it is also sometimes frustratingly—though rewardingly—difficult.
Miller’s definition of literature here is helpful. Literature is, he explains, “a strange use of words to refer to things, people, and events about which it is impossible ever to know whether or not they have somewhere a latent existence” (45). If such a definition seems counterintuitive, Miller wouldn’t disagree. He resorts to terms such as “magical” and “spiritual” to describe the worlds literature produces. As we read, we flesh-and-blood readers are transported via a bound bunch of papers covered in inky glyphs without any iconic power whatsoever toward a virtual world that “even the longest voyage in the ‘real world’ will not reach” (20). No wonder Miller calls our experience of entering those magical worlds one of “rapture” (29).
To return to Marías’s Visigoths, what Miller would argue is that the literature that the Spanish scholar regrets not having, had he had it, wouldn’t have even referred to the people that are his very object of inquiry. The literature that would have helped us “know” the Visigoths wouldn’t have actually referred to them. Not even once.
Perhaps at this point we might think to accuse Miller of being a bit precious. Sure, those works would be talking about fictional Visigoths. But don’t those Visigoths refer to the actual Visigoths? Aren’t we splitting hairs here?
Yes, it’s clear to just about anyone that there is indeed referentiality in any work of literature having the Visigoths as its subject, whether created by the original Visigoths or by some historical novelist writing about them centuries later. At the same time, that referentiality is, though not unimportant, ultimately incidental. Literature, though not referential per se, does of course use the same essential linguistic forms, both syntactic and lexical, that each of us use in regular everyday speech (the stuff that is, relatively speaking, more overtly referential). Poets and novelists do not go about inventing words or twisting syntax beyond the point of recognition when attempting to purchase their groceries or effect a bank transaction. They use language for the most part as would you and I in a conversation about the actual cold and my actual dog, to grab a random example. As a result, literary language, while not intentionally referential cannot help but retain its extratextual referentiality. The words and phrases of literature still carry within them their ability to point to actual objects in the real world of the reader. As a result, when a literary work makes mention of Visigoths, while the world it is creating—and ultimately its referents—may all be fictional, its language cannot help but direct the reader’s attention simultaneously to a combination of actual physical and historical referents.
For example, if a Visigothic writer (or a contemporary historical novelist, for that matter) were to tell a story of King Leovigild and his dog walking out in the cold of the Iberian meseta, the king, his dog, and the temperature would be ultimately nothing but linguistic constructs existing exclusively in a fictional realm. At the same time they would also simultaneously refer incidentally to historically verifiable animals, royalty, and weather fronts from the actual Visigothic period, not to mention the barking mutt sitting beside me as I write this sentence bundled up in long johns, a wool sweater, and a cap. Again, this may seem a bit precious of a distinction, but it matters.
As a result of this paradox, the reading of literature engages the reader’s mind in a constant back-and-forth between explicitly nonreferential linguistic signs and the incidental referential nature of many of those same signs. The nonreferential signs work together to build an internally consistent fictional world. The incidental referential power of the signs simultaneously anchor that fictional world in a sense of reality. On the one hand, the chain of nonreferential signifiers is producing Miller’s spiritual or magical experience of rapture for readers who find themselves “drawn forcibly out of themselves into another realm” (29). On the other hand, language’s inherent referentiality makes that rapture feel like it’s not taking you into the world of fiction but deeper into the real world you already inhabit!
This is why some like to speak of literary worlds not merely as fictional or even virtual but as possible. Possible worlds are, simply put, places and times that despite being fictional—entered through Miller’s experience of rapture—feel absolutely real. Indeed, they feel so real that they produce actual physiological symptoms in their readers: anxiety when heroes suffer, elation when they triumph, and tears when they die. On occasion those emotions carry sufficient power to inspire impassioned, even irate, letters to the real-life authors who dare kill a character off or make some other “mistake” which readers simply can’t countenance.
This is not, of course, because the readers believe the character is an actual human being. Your average reader, no matter how deeply engaged in the possible world, knows the difference between fictional realms and the real world they inhabit when they put their novel down. Still, the imaginative experience is close enough that the emotions felt are equally real, if rarely as enduring.
Such emotional responses evoked by literature, nevertheless, are only the tip of the literary-experience iceberg. The heart of the matter is that this dialectic between the referential and nonreferential that is endemic to the literary experience allows literature to go far beyond merely describing the reality of the possible worlds it creates. Speaking of the novel in particular, but making a point that could apply to all literature, Czech novelist Milan Kundera argues that the novel isn’t, in fact, about reality but about existence. Kundera explains the difference: “Existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of… The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence” (42, 44).
Literature as Existence
Javier Marías (again, son of the aforementioned Julián), has meditated frequently over the course of his career on this matter, perhaps inevitably as so many readers have mistaken Marias’s fictional works as nonfiction, or in other words, mistaken his fictional worlds for the real one in which they read his novels. While Marías isn’t above occasionally mocking those who do so, he also acknowledges the power of fiction to fool. He does lay some blame, however, at the feet of readers. Human beings, he hypothesizes, not only want to know reality but have an absolute need to do so. This need is so great that it extends beyond needing to know what has happened to understanding what hasn’t happened. Humans need not only to know reality but to explore the imaginary: “One needs to know the possible in addition to the certain, the conjectured and hypothesized, the failures as well as the facts, the rejected and that which could have been in addition to that which was” (112, trans. mine). Life itself is, after all, more than just the facts of what occurred. Life is not just what has happened, Marías argues, but what might have but didn’t, what was lost, what was omitted, even what was desired but never realized. Each of us knows in our heart of hearts that we are not just what we have done, but what we might have done, what we desired to do but for whatever reason never did, and what we were capable of but for whatever reasons were kept from doing. Thus literature thrives as “The realm of what might have been but never was, for that very reason that it exists in the land of what is still possible, of that which always remains pending, of that which isn’t yet rejected because it already happened or because we know that it never will” (164).
Literature is the space where such extra-real but definitely existential (per Kundera) matters can be explored. For Marías, thanks to literature, it may be that what didn’t happen but could have happened can on occasion end up being the only thing that ever did happen (as would be the case if we were ever to find a literary work on King Leovigild and his dog, but is definitely the case, Marías often reminds his readers, of Cervantes and the hero of his masterwork, Don Quijote) (115, 164). Fiction, Marías concludes, is “the future possible of reality” (164) or, in other words, a map of existence. We might view, then, literature as a kind of existential sandbox where what might have been but also what could have been or even what possibly was—however remotely—can be played out over and over again. Each work, to return to Miller, is “the fictive actualization of one alternative possibility not realized in the ‘real world.’” (Miller 33). This is why for Marías it would be more accurate to speak of literature as a thinking device than as a knowledge device, what he calls “literary thought.” Straightforward, easily explicable chunks of understanding do not arise from literature. Literary thought produces knowledge that is not only intensely complex but, according to Marías, dependent on context (recall its lack of referentiality) and thus contingent. Moreover, literature is by nature riddled with contradictions and therefore not subject to the reasons, proofs, or arguments that hold sway in reality (123). Gyatri Spivak adds her own argument for the impossibility of literary knowledge:
The affirmations we find in a poem or in a novel can’t be proven in the same sense in which we may prove a scientific affirmation. . . . Literature exists beyond the opposition between what is true and what is false, because although the world of which it speaks doesn’t exist, we can learn plenty from it.…What matters is not that literature be verifiable, but that learning to read it, despite not being able to verify its truth, forces the reader to use his or her imagination. (Spivak; translation mine).
Maurice Blanchot concurs: “[Literature] is a movement toward a point, a point which is not only unknown, obscure, foreign, but such that apart from this movement, it does not seem to have any sort of real prior existence” (in Miller 75). Javier Marías agrees that literature’s thought provides few answers: “There’s an enormous dark space in which only literature and the arts typically penetrate; surely . . . not to illuminate it or clarify it, but to perceive its immensity and its complexity by lighting a tiny match that merely allows us to see what’s there, to see that space, and to never forget it” (414).
Contrast this with historical writing. Historians traditionally seek to employ language in a more referential manner in hopes of describing precisely what actually was. Such language use, while much more helpful in teaching readers dates, places, people, and actual motivations, proves ultimately quite rigid. As with a hard-baked salt-and-flour map, in historical writing we view the world it depicts as a solid, immoveable given, and we see it always from the outside, as an object solid, fast, and fixed beyond anything our imaginations might wish to do with it. If we are satisfied with the tale it tells, there is nothing more to be explored. We abandon the text and take the dog out for a walk in the cold. But if we are dissatisfied? Well, once again we abandon the text, but this time we ignore the dog and instead hit the archives if not the archeological dig to unearth more evidence. Historical writing is to literary writing what the salt-and-flour map is to our experimental sandbox.
In contrast, literary tales drive us further into literary worlds. While historical writing can be fact-checked (did the Visigothic King Leovigild have a dog or didn’t he?), in the fictional account of King Leo and his faithful canine companion we have and will always have access only to what the author narrated once upon a time. As Miller writes, literature “keeps its secrets” (39). The author tells once, through his narrator, and then goes silent. Rather than close off textual avenues as historical writing does, this secret keeping makes readers aware of all the possibilities the author didn’t share. The reader understands that each and every other unpursued tangent, unmentioned detail, and unshared mystery were once possibilities and thus are still available to the imagination. As a reader of literature I have no access to archives or archeology; instead I rely wholly on the author—on what he or she shares or hasn’t shared. I may even form opinions about the author’s manipulation of what I, inevitably, come to regard as my story. I might pen an angry letter when my favorite character is eliminated or pursue a hobby in fan fiction.
Thus as I, the reader, engage with a literary work, my mind whirs in a host of directions, in a fashion unlikely ever to be mobilized by a nonfictional text. I work through the intricacies of literary language. I recognize language that is residually referential, and I make note of those referents as I continue to give order to the linguistic thrust of the story. I also consider the decisions of the authorial voice carefully guiding my reading. I wonder about what was cast aside or never considered, about what might have been. And I wonder why. In so doing, I may pay even closer attention to what might otherwise seem throwaway details, understanding that these will be forever my only access to the secrets the story and its author pretend to keep. All of this work and the processes that produce it ultimately generate the kind of knowledge we enjoy of Roman, Muslim, and Medieval Spanish realities but that we still lack when it comes to the Visigoths. We might say then, to work our way around Barthes, that what literature opens to us isn’t so much the reality of a people, a place, or a moment, but 1) a sense of existence 2) by way of reality effects. Both, as Barthes would argue, are extremely indirect dynamics.
Such indirection helps explain why, per Derrek Attridge, the experience of literature is such that even when its stories are about the most immediate here and now, in the end it “always speaks to me of a foreign country and a distant past” (52). Even a just-published tale set in the present and in my very own hometown must still traverse a web of linguistic, generic, social, cultural, political, and economic assumptions before it registers with me. The experience will stretch me beyond my current cultural milieu and force me to experience what Attridge calls “alterity,” of being absolutely outside of oneself, of knowledge, of comprehension, of solid existential grounding. Alterity is comprised by a double experience. The first is an experience of radical loss, of the comprehension of my inability to comprehend, something Philip Fisher describes as a moment of “pure presence,” as a moment “so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else” (Bennet 5). But in this moment of pure presence, we recognize simultaneously our “procedures of comprehension beginning to change” (27). In other words, not only do we experience otherness but we become other to ourselves. To open a literary work is to become vulnerable, to expose ourselves not only to new people, places, and experiences, but to our own alteration as we attempt to makes sense of the novelty of others via the literary process (Attridge 52, 76–77). As a result, literature takes us spatially, temporally, and existentially where no other form of knowledge could. Again Marías the younger: “There are things we know only because literature has shown them to us, or has allowed us to become conscious of them and to acknowledge them” (414).
Seen in this light, might we not argue that perhaps there is no better way to engage with (versus “accurately understand”) any foreign time or place (if not one’s own) than through literature? While literature will never provide all the facts and figures for solving specific problems, it more effectively engages us as human beings with those problems as problems that are ultimately human—either in their consequences or in their causes. William Paulson argues that, not being obliged to tell the definitive story of real people in real times and real places, literature is able to devote much of its attention to society’s margins, exploring the mundane and the peripheral, the stuff that fact-seeking experts tend to ignore. Additionally, such marginality allows literature to proffer readers the experience of existence on the margins, that is, per Attridge, of being other. Finally, it does so without forcing them to concede all forms of power in order to do so. As a result, while the social sciences may provide information about marginalization and its implications, “only art has the unique capacity to transform those implications into personal experience” (Paulson in Spires 241).
Novels then don’t replace history or sociology or anthropology, nor do they perform political or economic analysis. They can’t because, as we’ve seen, the knowledge they produce is hardly extractable. For Marías literature is ultimately a kind of momentary understanding of something that we did not know we knew: “It’s a form of knowing that knows that which it didn’t realize it knew” (123). “Or in fewer words,” concludes Marías, “though unable to explain it, it reveals the mystery” (123).
Kundera, speaking of the novel—the principal literary genre for long-form storytelling today—calls it the genre of “God’s laughter.” Literature is godlike in its audacity to explain the meaning of things, but permanently ironic with respect to any conclusions it derives therefrom. “The art inspired by God’s laughter,” he writes, “does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them. Like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before” (160). The tapestry of literature remains a mystery, even when witnessed and submitted to exhaustive description. Like life, in the end.
Toward a Spanish-Language Republic of Letters
And so, understanding now the mystery that can’t be explained but that explains so much, we turn back to the twenty-first-century gift that is world literature, and specifically the literature of the Spanish-speaking world, the Spanish-language Republic of Letters. Over the next thirteen chapters we will experience the contemporary Spanish-speaking world in a way no one may ever experience Visigothic civilization. We will think, experience, and explore our way through the possibilities, probabilities, and purported realities of Spain, across to Argentina, then up the cordillera of the Andes from Chile to Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, and back to Spain, then across to the Caribbean and finally to Asturias, the sometimes celebrated birthplace of Spain that nonetheless insists to this day on not being fully a part of the place to which it gave birth. As we do so, the stories we read, for all their meditation on human existence as lived in these far-off places, will be, first and foremost, literature. Consequently, in the coming pages we will, above all else, read them as literature. We will seek to understand their signifying processes, the “extraordinary power of words to go on signifying in the total absence of any phenomenal referent” (Miller 16). We will seek out moments where “standard language” stammers, trembles, cries, and even sings (Deleuze and Guattari 176). We will pay careful attention to what Attridge calls “the specificity and singularity of literary writing as it manifests itself through the deployment of form” (13). And we will attempt to do so free of any overarching social or political theories, the “instrumentalist” readings that would substitute literature for the social sciences. The only theory we’ll be working with explicitly here is the one just elaborated above: that literature works through explicitly nonreferential language.
Yet, as we’ve noted, the incidental referential power of those same literary words is always there, an inextricable component of the literary experience. Indeed my very selections over the coming pages are grounded in what I would call my own “experience” of the Spanish-speaking world and my desire to go on experiencing it richly and profoundly. Over the last two decades, in addition to teaching Spanish-language literature, I have regularly taught an introductory course in International Studies. As I’ve done so, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that a good number of students respond most powerfully to the few fictional texts we’re able to squeeze into a semester devoted mostly to extractable facts and figures. As a result, throughout these years my reading of world literature has been inevitably guided by an eye for stories that open up geographically and culturally distant worlds.
Over the course of the next thirteen chapters we’ll visit some of the most culturally informed and historically eye-opening of the Spanish-speaking worlds I’ve discovered during that time. We’ll visit worlds depicted in tales of lives lived against backdrops of economic transformation if not crisis. We’ll read of the weight of memories of the disappeared, the tortured, and the murdered. We’ll experience through these novels the existential weight of specific cultural histories and we’ll see the specifically cultural approaches used to confront such burdens.
Our study will be organized along three principal themes, kicked off with an introduction of sorts. That introduction will be built around a close look at the 2009 novel, Señales que precederán el fin del mundo by the Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera. Herrera’s novel grapples with many of the issues explored in this study, from poverty and violence to a sense of permanent, inescapable existential colonization. Of most interest to me in this first novel is its play with language, its explicit interest in new modes of expression that might capture new human experience in a new millennium. It’s title, of course, inspires the title of this study.
From this visit to millennial Mexico we’ll move to three novels inviting readers to experience the lives of those dealing with economic challenges particular to life in the new millennium, Belén Gopeguí’s Reality, César Aira’s La villa, and Tomás Eloy Martínez’s El cantor de tangos. Our tales here come from Spain and Argentina, countries boasting economies historically more advanced than many of their Spanish-language contemporaries. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, both nations suffered economic crises. The ironic combination of chaos and malaise that ensued proved fertile soil for writers curious to explore human existence under the confines of what pundits touted, up until the moment of those crises, as the irresistible demands of a new economic world order.
From the miseries and mysteries of economic crises, our journey will take the inevitable dark turn into the myriad spaces of past and present violence in the Spanish-speaking world. While much of that violence had officially ended by the new millennium, its psychological and emotional legacy, when not its political and material one, continued to exert extraordinary force. From tales of the disappeared in Argentina and Chile (Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia and Alejandro Zambra’s Formas de volver a casa), to stories from the Violence of Peru (Santiago Roncagliolo’s Abril rojo) and the multidecade guerrilla struggles in Guatemala (Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Enchanted Pebbles) and Colombia (Evelio Rosero’s Los ejércitos), war—hot, bloody, and frequently incomprehensible—engages the lives and literature of Latin America. Even Spain, though three generations removed from its last civil war, continues to work through its oft-repressed memories, as we’ll see in Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina.
Thankfully, for all the explicit pain and poverty brought on by acutely felt economic, political, and social crises, most parts of the Spanish-speaking world today are enjoying unprecedented political and economic stability. Yet for all the advantages of a world no longer at war or constantly reeling from chronic runaway inflation, the human condition persists with its longing for more perfect freedoms to say nothing of justice where those freedoms were once denied. Indeed, while we rightfully celebrate newfound political peace and economic stability, it bears remembering that such conditions often come at a cost. Nations move on from historic tragedies but do so by burying their pasts, never addressing criminal legacies even as dysfunctional governments cede power to global political and financial hegemons when not to their own ruling classes, always happy to keep the peace for a hefty, if indirectly taxed, economic and political price.
The indirect, subtle nature of this tax is so often experienced as “mere” cultural or existential alienation. In a few select cases, however, the sense of neocolonialism is more than a feeling. At a time when the end of European empire has led to mass decolonization and the concomitant tripling of the number of nation-states around the globe, Puerto Rico, for instance, remains a colony of a state that doesn’t even speak its language. Cuba finds itself caught in a time warp. In Spain a cultural hodgepodge of cooperations and colonizations simultaneously champ at the bit and chafe at the yoke of a state to which they remain shackled without possibility of recourse to anything but faux referenda or increasingly unpopular acts of terror. While global technologies, media, and supply chains draw geographically disparate peoples ever closer, many of the provinces of states that would claim for themselves the status of nation would themselves be independent nations.
To experience a bit of this very typical twenty-first-century political and cultural ontology, we conclude with novels by Puerto Rican writers Eduardo Lalo and Mayra Santos-Febres, the Cuban writer Wendy Guerra, and finally, stories from Spain’s most unexpected nation, Asturias, as told by the multifaceted writer and intellectual, Xuan Bello. We do so not merely to illustrate yet another angle on the existential condition of the twenty-first-century Spanish-speaking world, but to foreground what is arguably the single unifying condition across this entire community. For all its legacy of economic turmoil and political violence, the present and future for these countries in a globalized world appears increasingly Caribbean/Asturian in its nature. That is, they are increasingly safe, healthy, and relatively wealthy, but still politically and economically neutered and culturally adrift.
Whatever the situation, in every case in the chapters that follow Spanish-language narrative fiction is a vehicle for exploration and discovery but rarely for simple, straightforward answers. We should hardly expect the novels we read to address explicitly the problems of Spain, Argentina, Mexico, or Puerto Rico among others—to say nothing of offering straightforward solutions. Instead we will look for moments whose nonreferential language proves incidentally referential to the milieu of their creation, awakening us thereby to questions swirling in what Kundera called “sweet lazy liberty” around their problems (162). We will do so with a certain confidence that such exploration might not only reveal certain truths about the past, but might carry us to some sense of existential understanding that we might be tempted to adorn with a giant, imposing, but rather satisfying capital T. We’d be mistaken to do so, of course, but that’s the experience of literature. None of it may be true, but it sure feels like it. Which is why we read.
