Some would argue that world-renowned writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the patriarch of the Latin American family literary tree. And with novels such as 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, his place is certainly cemented in the global literature canon. Yet the recent release of his latest novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, has met with disappointment.
Alberto Manguel, literary critic for The Guardian and a staunch Marquez supporter in the past, noted in his review of the novel (tellingly entitled ‘A Sad Affair‘ that Marquez “allowed his old Charon (the novel’s central character) to forget, and the resulting memories are not melancholy, not even sad, but merely pitiful and disappointing”.
So too, iconic Latin American writer Isabel Allende, creator of such culturally and politically significant works such as Of Love and Shadows and The House of Spirits has come under fire from critics for her current novel, a retelling of the Zorro legend.
Literary critic for The Mercury News, Charles Matthews, in his critique of Allende’s latest work, succintly summed up the latest literary offering from a writer “once celebrated for a special blend of magical realism and feminist insight in novels about lives shadowed by the troubled social and political history of Latin America” as ‘melodramatic claptrap’. Matthews complains that “If you expect Allende to provide serious insight into political history or the role of women, you’ll be disappointed”.
Indeed with the recent trend of so many contemporary Latin American writers rejecting many of the literary and cultural precedents set by their forbears in favour of a more globally embracing viewpoint, such criticism of these recent works by the Latin American literary pantheon may not come as a surprise to many.
Some would hold that the writers once immortalised as the El Boom generation are now being systematically relegated to the status of intellectual dinosaurs.
So has the Latin American literary revolution really ended? Or has the battlefield merely been redefined by the next generation of rebels?
And has magical realism, the much-loved literary style, in which to quote theorist Alberto Rios, “we find the transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal” had its day?
It certainly would be shocking to argue that this literary genre, championed by scholars such as Lois Parkinson Zamora & Wendy B. Faris as being ‘an international movement with a wide-ranging history and a significant influence among the literatures of the world’ has lost its currency in the modern literary world. But the new generation of Latin American writers is saying just that.
Why? Well that new nemesis known as globalization is said to lie at the root of this change. We live in a world in which the realities of events such as Hurricane Katrina or the terrorist activities of Jemaah Islamiyah and Al Quaida bind us together on a global scale undreamt of even thirty years ago.
Sociologist Anthony Giddens, who defines the phenomenon of globalization as ‘decoupling of space and time, emphasising that with instantaneous communications, knowledge and culture can be shared around the world simultaneously’, perfectly typifies this changing reality.
So too, Dutch academic Ruud Lubbers in his definition of globalization as “a process in which geographic distance becomes a factor of diminishing importance in the establishment and maintenance of cross border economic, political and socio-cultural relations” could be perfectly describing the current social and political state of Latin America as it relates to the world at large.
Is it any wonder that 60-year-old tales of revolution would fail to bind contemporary Latin American scribes to the world of their forbears?
In her article New Era Succeeds Years Of Solitude New York Times writer Nicole La Forte noted in her examination of the new guard of Latin American writers that “their short stories and novels reflect the world in which they’ve grown up: urban settings where cyber cafes sidle up to slums and where a Friday night probably involves watching an American rerun on television”.
How can Allende’s Zorro, all sword and swashbuckle, hope to contend with the majesty and power of Yugi-O as a hero in the minds the younger generations of Latin Americans, his historical and cultural significance notwithstanding?
Contemporary Latin American writers such as Albert Fuguet and Edmundo Paz Soldan liken themselves and their literary output as belonging to a new hybrid of Latin American – one who sees himself as a citizen of a world unchecked by the geographical, philosophical or political borders that so strongly demarcated the fictional universes of the literary set that went before them.
New wave writer Albert Fuguet, whose novel The Movies of My Life, caused a storm of debate upon its release in 2003, with its distinctly modern style that was a vast departure from what many had come to see as being typically Latin American, commented to La Forte in her New York Times article that “Latin America has changed…I never felt that Latin America was the way it was portrayed in the books we had to read’.
Of course controversy erupted after this statement. Yet is it so hard to believe that contemporary writers would see themselves first and foremost as citizens of the world rather than of just one nation?
A sentiment certainly felt by Edmundo Paz Soldan when talking about his novel The Matter Of Desire wherein he confesses that, unlike his literary fathers, he “belong[ed] to a generation that does not believe in big projects to change the world” and that he and others of his generation were “more urban in their outlook and were interested in the relationship between literature, popular culture, and mass media”.
Traitorous words to many, undoubtedly, but a declaration of independence to a new generation who look at themselves and their place in the 21st century from a vastly different viewpoint.
So is the new wave of Latin American writers, as some believe, sellouts to American ideals and turncoats to the memories, history and suffering of those before them? Or has the new generation of literary rebels simply shifted the revolution onto a global battlefield? One where the realities of political injustice, currently raging holy wars, environmental disasters and the atrocities of human rights abuse are issues that affect all, regardless of the place they were born in or the history, however significant, of the rebels who fought for change before them.
