Sarduy Echeverría

Sarduy, the Boom, and the Post-Boom
Author(s): Roberto González Echevarría, Caroline A. Mansfield and Antonio Vera León
Source: Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 15, No. 29, The Boom in Retrospect: A
Reconsideration (Jan. - Jun., 1987), pp. 57-72
Published by: Latin American Literary Review
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SARDUY, THE BOOM, AND THE POST-BOOM
ROBERTO GONZALEZ ECHEVARR?A
Translated by Caroline A. Mansfield and Antonio Vera Le?n
1.
In his recent books, Sarduy loses himself in the extravagance of his

previous works, in the gallery of mirrors that reflects back the texts already
written. He again performs a rigorous analysis of the Latin American
tradition within which he creates his work and to which he now adds a
reflection about his own life as a writer. What does being a Latin American
writer mean? How can one create a woik as heterodox as his from within a
cultural tradition in which the structures of power and authority are so
rigid? What is the relationship between power and writing, between
authority and literary discourse? Where does Sarduy situate himself with
respect to modernity and post-modernity, and what does this position reveal
about the Latin American narrative today? These are the questions raised by
Sarduy's latest works, but not, of course, in the abstract language used
here. On the contrary, if something is evident in the most recent ground
covered by Sarduy, if something is visible in the path he takes in the
eighties, it is a concretely autobiographical inclination. Now, Sarduy
returns to America not by way of the Orient; rather, the New World itself is
the one visited, as much literally as literarily: not Nepal or New Delhi, but
Camag?ey or Caracas, San Juan or Mexico City; not Tibet, but the South
American Jungle.
Sarduy visited Caracas in the early 1980s for a conference concurrent
with the presentation of the R?mulo Gallegos Prize, which is awarded
every four years to Latin American writers for a novel published during that
period. The prize has been won by Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez, Carlos
Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among many others. This was one of
Sarduy's many visits to Latin America in the past few years. The encounter
with South America, and with Caracas in particular, was of singular
importance. In Caracas Sarduy approached the Latin America of Do?a
B?rbara (1929) and The Lost Steps (1953) . For Caracas is not only
R?mulo Gallego's city, but Alejo Carpentier's as well. It was in the
Venezuelan capital that Carpentier wrote some of his most important woiks
between 1945 and 1959, most especially The Lost Steps, that critical summa
57
58 Latin American Literary Review
of Spanish American literature that originated in part from the author's

experience of the Venzuelan jungle. For Carpentier, Venezuela constituted
a synthesis of what is American. Sarduy will arrive at the same insight
through the novel of his compatriot and master.
In Caracas Sarduy also met with members of the Cuban delegation to
the conference, who had meant a great deal to him early in his career,
writers such as Cintio Vitier and Fina Garc?a Murruz, survivors of the
"Or?genes" Group and close associates of Jos? Lezama Lima, who had just
died. Sarduy also met with Caribbean writers who admired him and whom
he has influenced, such as the Puerto Rican Luis Rafael S?nchez. The trip
to Caracas contributed to the recovery of the most traditional Latin
American theme, whose center is nature and whose obsessive landscape is
the jungle. Colibr? ["Hummingbird", 1984] is the product ofthat recovery.
This textual journey to the jungle in quest of the origins of a Latin American
literary tradition shapes itself to that of the protagonist inThe Lost Steps,
searching for roots and for the inspiration to create. Carpentier published
his great novel at the age of forty-nine; Sarduy was forty-eight when
Colibr? appeared.
The reflective nature of Carpentier's novel, which was based on a
poignant introspection by the author in which life and work are fused and
confused, has its counterpart in all of Sarduy's recent texts. Sarduy's
literary journey up to the 1980s has attained sufficient literary and historical
density to act as an unavoidable facticity, a facticity that is imposed as
rereading and as origin of whatever followed. The clearest sign of this
process is La simulaci?n ["Simulation"], a book of essays published
precisely in Caracas (1982). From the very first page it is clear that one of
La simulaci?n's objects of speculation is Sarduy's own life. The best
example of this self-reflection, however, is Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado
["A Fleeting and Disguised Witness", 1985], a surprising book of poetry,
above all because of the traditional nature of its versification: these poems
are sonnets and ten-syllable d?cimas with clear Gongoristic and Quevedian
echoes. Autobiographical mode and submission to traditional forms are,
jointly, the most visible marks of Sarduy's texts in these years.
The return to conventional literary forms as much in Colibr? as in Un
testigo fugaz y disfrazado reflects a historical phenomenon of undeniable
impact: the dispersion of ?izTel Quel group, and with it a certain retreat on
the theoretical and experimental front. Undoubtedly, the deaths of Roland
Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan contributed to this
withdrawal. But theoretical fatigue had made itself increasingly felt in their
Sarduy, The Boom, and The Post-Boom 59
works, especially in Barthes', which, like Sarduy's, whose work was very
probably influenced by Sarduy, turned gradually to autobiographical and
who aesthetic concerns. The later Barthes frees himself from the neutral,
scientific tone of his semiotic phase in order to produce a self-reflection
marked thematically and formally by eroticism. The turn toward the literary
perhaps is a recognition that theory, as important as it was, had been the
least compelling aspect of the work of the ma?tres penseurs of French
criticism; that Foucault's obsessions with those excluded from society
(prisoners, sexual perverts), Lacan's Joycean style (neologisms, play on
words, a certain linguistic liturgy), always averse to scientific
metalanguage, and Barthes' fixing gaze (of the body, of the contour of
objects and spectacles), were the most lasting and pertinent literary elements
produced by the group. All of this is visible in Sarduy not merely as the
"influence" of French thought in his works, but as an integral part of
Sarduy's own project. In many ways, the transformations of the Parisian
clique represent a sort slide toward Sarduy, since it had been Sarduy, more
than anyone else, who had systematically applied Tel Quel theory to actual
literary products.
The exhaustion of theory leads to a recovery of conventional forms and
themes?to the primacy of plot in Colibr?, to the jungle, and to the rigorous
conventional metrics of Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado. But it also
consists?once again, although in a very different manner?of a return to
the beginning, to origins. Not a return to a unique origin, void and bare,
but rather to a formed origin; that is to say, to the forms prior to the
demolition by telquelian experiments, to the forms bequeathed by tradition,
by power and authority. To the writer who abandons his literary youth, his
passion for the new, traditional form is a discipline. Already a part of
tradition, Sarduy is forced to fathom, as in Maitreya (1977), the importance
of the works of the masters as well as his own place within tradition. This
transition and self-reflection figure prominently in Colibr?.
In the same way that Escrito sobre un cuerpo ("Written on a Body"
1969) and Barroco ["Baroque" 1974] reflected upon the themes of former
stages in Sarduy's career, La simulaci?n dramatizes those of the most
recent phase. I say dramatizes because, as in previous essays, Sarduy
refuses to generate a metalanguage that pretends to escape literary
discourse. Thus, as in Escrito sobre un cuerpo, characters of Sarduy's
own fiction appear in La simulaci?n, and an entire scene from Maitreya is
inserted. Furthermore, Sarduy includes in La simulaci?n vignettes of his
own life that reflect the themes of the book; as in Roland Barthes par lui
m?me , Sarduy is the principal object of analysis in La simulaci?n because

the book wishes to isolate the elements that make his work peculiarly his.
La simulaci?n seeks the Sarduy in Sarduy. Pretense, simulation, are
offered as the distinguishing marks of this work and as that which
motivates every individual, above all the artist. The central thesis of the
book is that there is a "feigning (im)pulse" implicit in the death wish whose
source is biological. That which is "natural"?also in the sense of
"normal"?is therefore already simulated. In other words, we suppose
with automatic Platonism that the copy is weak, secondary, parasitic, while
the model is the original, that which is strong and natural. Sarduy inverts
this conceptual habit: the copy is the strongest because it is what generates
movement, what awakens the subversive capacity of the model. The model
only survives in the copy. According to Sarduy, this dissimulating impulse
is manifested in what he calls the aggression of the copy against the
original. The transvestite outdoes what women in "femininity," his "make
up" makes her most violent and lethal characteristics stand out. The excess
of the copy is the supplement; the ontic is always the addition, which adds,
subtracting from the original. To be is to (un)assemble, to evade power by
camouflaging the body in order to mimic the forms of power, so that they
may be pointed back?now as subversive and lethal weapons?at power
itself. It is here (in Colibr?) that American nature will come into play.
Nature, with its mimetic exuberance, motivates the process of inflating the
copy, or the copiousness of the copy (as is evident mMaitreya, especially in
the obese, Botero-like characters).
Sarduy bases these assertions on statistical studies that "prove" that the
mimetic activity of certain butterflies, which before was believed to be a
form of defensive camouflage, is totally useless; hence it may simply be the
product of a desire to disappear, to die. To die is to die. Pure excess.
Excess as issuing from a biological impulse. By pretending, which is the
only way to be, transvestites play with death. In this theory of Sarduy's
there is, curiously enough, an echo of a certain/m de si?cle vitalism which
had a great influence on Ortega y Gasset's work, especially on his theories
about the sportive character of human culture?culture is that which is not a
reaction to material necessities; it is that which is in excess of them. There
is a notable difference, however, that at the level of the history of ideas we
would have to attribute not to Ortega y Gasset but rather to Heidegger and
Bataille, since here excess is at once being and an impulse towards death,
being towards death. This self-annihilating character lends an appearance
of mortal masquerade to Sarduy's version of American art (and of the
American artists), which links it to the Baroque. Evidently Sarduy's

speculation about secondariness, about the primacy of the copy, about the
persistence of the model in the copy, has to do with American art and
American being in general: American art is transvestism, a Baroque
spectacle. That which is American would then no longer be merely
secondary. American is that which is by being secondary. Upon copying
that which is European, in the gesture of incorporating and visibly
assimilating European forms, American art and being constitute themselves
not as copies, but as the only life that the original can actually have. The
vignettes based on Sarduy's life, especially the first one, bring these
considerations to the most concrete level possible.
In this vignette Sarduy narrates a story from his childhood, which takes
place in a Camag?ey described in Lezama Lima's terms, with shades of
Amelia Pel?ez. It is Carnival time. Sarduy and his father put on costumes.
The father, wrapped up in a sheet, is dressed as a ghost, the boy as a
woman. The pair could not be more suggestive. By dressing as a woman
the boy abolishes any resemblance to the father, denying him in the most
subversive way possible within the Spanish American context. The father,
in turn, has transformed himself into an image of death. The vignette is a
minute Baroque allegory of the central themes in La simulaci?n. The
carnivalesque joke reveals a profound stratum of culture in the act of
concealing itself. That stratum of culture is at odds with official ideology.
Pretense, disguise, paradoxicaUy make the truth, or at least its image, break
forth. The model, form, that which is traditional, surrenders its
movements, its breath, to the copy, which lives off it by means of a kind of
parasitism. The model, vacated, is now the image of death, a fixed form.
By coming into the play of the book disguised as himself, Sarduy as author
assumes the risk of his theory. Clearly, to dress up as yourself is also a
form of simulation, perhaps the most effective. There is no exhibitionism
m Im simulaci?n ; nor is there reticence or prudishness as in similar essays
by the major writers of the tradition, for example, Borges, Fuentes, Paz, or
Lezama Lima himself.
2.
Of all the transgressions against the Latin American literary tradition in

the last few years, none is as radical as the one perpetrated in Colibr?. In
his most recent novel, Sarduy abandons the visibly Cuban themes of his
previous work in order to focus on the central theme of Latin American
literature: the relationship betwen the American landscape and the culture of
the New World. Ever since the chroniclers of the Indies, ever since the
great travel-books of the nineteenth century and Sarmiento's Facundo,
Bello's Silvas americanas, Neruda's General Song and Carpentier's The
Lost Steps, Latin American nature, with its singularity and exuberance, has
been the emblem of what is new, different?of what is unusual. How to
think of the American landscape? What is its place in natural history?
Writing America, telling its history, must be the account of that
unusualness, as much in Fern?ndez de Oviedo, who thinks from the point
of view of fixed neo-Scholastic schemes, as in Hegel, who already thinks
of the natural world as history, even though he vacillates over exactly
where to place American nature?either at the beginning or at the end of
history. The theme of nature has given American literature the mark of
newness and of modernity, and by accumulation, that of stability and
facticity; the American tradition is the tradition of what is new. This
paradox is the origin of Colibr?.
In Colibr? Sarduy abandons the figurative geography of his previous
novels?Cuba/the East?to unfold a map made up of the clich?s of the
Latin American novel of the jungle. It is a symbolic map like the ones in
The Lost Steps and One Hundred Years of Solitude: the river, the estuary,
the jungle, the cove, the clearing in the forest, and as contrast, the city. In
this literary cartography Sarduy dismantles the most elementary
components, the foundations of Latin American culture, revealing its most
profound secret, where sex and being, language and social praxis are
intertwined. The novel of the jungle constitutes the epic stratum of Latin
American literature, that which relates the origin and evolution of the
founding characters and their values; the epic current in Latin American
narrative, as in The Lost Steps (Santa M?nica de los Venados) andO
Hundred Years of Solitude (Macondo), the history of the creation of cities,
of the birth of the heroes who carried it out. The novel of the jungle,
including Neruda's General Song, narrates the marriage of American man
to the virgin nature of the Continent and shows how Latin American culture
emerges from their amorous struggle. On his journey to the jungle the
Latin American writer finds himself and encounters those epic origins,
inasmuch as the theme of nature legitimizes him as part of tradition. This is
the process narrated in The Lost Steps and taken up again in Colibr? : the
origin of tradition, the origin of the authorial figure, both being basic
components of the authority on which literature as a Latin American
institution is founded.
Colibr?, and we can immediately perceive the nature and breadth of the
transgression, is a blend of gay epic and pastoral, revolving around the
problematic passage from adolescence to maturity; that is to say, the
moment in which the individual, acculturated (subjected to a code of laws,
to the Other), begins to become a part of society. It is a transition parallel to
that from being a young writer to one who is part of the canon. Colibri's is
a pre-heroic world, a world that exists before Jos? Arcadio Buendia marries
and founds Macondo. Of course, Colibr? takes apart the myths that sustain
the gay world as well. The pastoral is another version of America's utopia,
while the epic is the creation of a hero who bases his power on the
authoritative submission of the Other. In short, the hero is a version of the
antecedents of the Latin American dictator who ends up being a per-version
of his previous literary renderings.
This focus on the transition from adolescense to maturity reflects a
process of squaring accounts in Sarduy's work; his passing from the
position of a young writer, who practices novelty like terrorism was an
emblem of himself, to the posture of a mature writer, who has already
consolidated a position and whose novelty has been converted into a
recognizable discourse, into a kind of facticity. With Colibr? Sarduy's
literary adolesence ends; with this book he shakes off the mask of the
portrait of the artist as a young man. Cuba as a theme has been exhausted
in Maitreya, and the debt to Lezama Lima seems to have been settled with
that haUucinating biography of Luis Leng. Cobra had left behind the
experiments most clearly marked by the theories of Tel Quel. This does not
mean that there are no traces of these two themes, but they appear as part of
that facticity that is a signature of Sarduy's own style. Colibr? boasts not
only figures of what is Spanish American, but also figures already thought
of as properly Sarduian.
This self-reflection is announced in the first sentence of the novel: "He
danced between two mirrors, naked, behind the bar." The two mirrors
infinitely multiply the protagonist's image; given the identification of the
author with the protagonist, nakedness projects self analysis. In fact,
Sarduy's images in the novel are multiple, even though derived, above all,
from two figures: the protagonist and the narrator. These two figures, of
course, are protean. The narrator speaks at times in a masculine voice and
at others in a feminine one. Sometimes the protagonist seems to be only the
projection of the other characters' desires. In any case, the vicissitudes of
both reflect known elements in Sarduy's biography, as is the case in hi
simulaci?n. The text of Colibr? is like a gallery of mirrors in which images
of the author are reflected and multiply, dissolving the original. We do not
know, of course, who Sarduy really is, except the exuberant proliferation
of his figures, as elusive as the hummingbird itself and as much a product
of the illusion of movement that this bird projects. Clearly, it is not only
this narcissistic obsession that controls the text; various allegorical strata of
signification that include American themes related to nature are added to it.
The action in Colibr? begins in a place typical of Sarduian fiction: an
emporium close to a great river, where handsome young men engage in
fake, wrestling matches for the pleasure of the nouveau riche and military
brass addicted to violence and discipline. As at the end of Maitreya, we
are in the inflationary world of petro-dollars and drug trafficking, the world
of luxury and waste, of the supplementary. La Casona is situated at the
edge of the jungle and is presided over by La Regenta (also La Canosa,
etc.), a madam whose original gender is unknown. Given to imperious
gestures and unappealable commands, La Regenta (provisional queen?)
governs the joint with an iron fist, assisted by a dwarf who acts as referee
in the fixed combats and a series of decorators and cooks who make up the
place. The Madam and her emporium have their antecedents in Rivera's The
Vortex (1924) and Vargas Llosa's The Green House (1965); in the myth of
the jungle, and that of El Dorado, alluded through the protagonist in
Carpentier's The Lost Steps.
Colibr? arrives at this place from the jungle. He is young, extremely
beautiful, his hair is blond, almost white. His ancestry is unknown. Like
all Sarduian characters, he seems to have been born ad hoc for fiction.
They name him Colibr? (hummingbird) because of the posture of flight that
he assumes as he jumps over the fence and because of his agility as a
wrestler. Colibrf s first match is against an obese Japanese sumo wrestler,
who is unable to seize him and in his effort to do so hits his head against
the back wall, on which there is a mural depicting a winter scene. Colibr?
becomes the hero of the joint, valued and sought after by the "whales" (the
"cetaceans", etc.), that is, the wealthy clients who frequent the spot. But
the Madam has fallen in love with him, and Colibr? flees to the jungle
pursued by her agents. In the jungle he comes across the Japanese
wrestler, and they first become friends, then lovers. The hunters find
them, and they are separated in their flight. Colibr? hides in the capital, in
another joint where he works in the painting of "tamed fleas." There the
Regenta's men find him again, he fights anew with the Fat Jap and with the
giant, metamorphosed into a tall nun who attacks him with a knife which
has a crucifix for a handle (an homage to Bufiuel). But Colibr? manages to
escape once more, returning to the jungle on a trip resembling that of the
narrator-protagonist of The Lost Steps . In the deep of the jungle he again
encounters his persecutors?they can be found at the origin, the source that
is not pure, that also contains violence. They return Colibr? to La Casona,
adoring him now as though he were a deity. Everyone returns to the
Emporium, which has become an asylum for benign old lunatics. Colibr?,
who has begun to show a capacity for leadership, burns the place down,
only to reconstruct it, requesting that youths be brought in to liven up the
joint as before. The circular nature of the story is evident. In the end,
Colibr? replaces La Regenta, and in this way, retrospectively, reveals her
origin.
3.
Can Sarduy's work be seen as a paradigm of the most recent Latin

American novel, ofthat body of narrative that some have already called the
post-Boom? Prudence counsels us to respond that it is too soon to
establish such demarcations, that the present is difficult, if not impossible,
to place historically. If the Boom exists, it was due to cultural, political,
and economic factors that made it such that a group of novelists was
recognized as somewhat homogenous, despite the differences in their ages
and backgrounds. Such conditions do not exist today. What does indeed
continue, however, is an enormous vitality in Latin American fiction, with
the writers of the Boom (except Cort?zar, of course) and others peripheral
to the phenomenon who have continued writing with great imaginative
energy and success. Remarkable works keep coming from, among the
major figures, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia
M?rquez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Jos? Donoso and Augusto Roa
Bastos, and from among the younger contingent (the group to which
Sarduy belongs due to his age)?Manuel Puig, Miguel Barnet, and
Reynaldo Arenas. If there is a post-Boom, it must include some of the
works by each of these writers, since all work during the same time and
under similar conditions. Clearly, some of the novels of the older group
continue to repeat certain characteristics of the novels of the Boom,
especially those by Vargas Llosa and Fuentes. If we think of the post
Boom as consisting of some of the books produced by the Boom's
protagonists after the famous novels that consecrated them, and these in
addition to those written by the younger group, perhaps then we could
discern some common characteristics to attempt a very provisional
description of the period. Let us venture some general ideas, taking Sarduy
as a starting point but without pretending to turn him into a paradigm. But
beforehand, and in order to see the phenomenon of the post-Boom in a
context that clarifies it somewhat, let us consider the characterisitic of a
movement undoubtedly linked to the post-Boom: post-Modernism, or
postmodern literature. We will approach post-Modernism through the
proposals of the North American novelist John Barth and the French
theorist Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard.
In a necessarily autobiographical essay, since he has been considered
one of the foremost postmodern writers, Barth meditates on the distinction
between moderns and post-moderns.1 First, he affirms something that
must be kept in mind when talking about the post-Boom; post-Modernism
is necessarily epigonic, as much a continuation as a rupture, and in no way
can it be thought of as a negation of Modernism. Barth includes T.S. Eliot,
William Faulkner, Andr? Gide, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann,
Robert Musil, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Miguel de
Unamuno and Virginia Woolf among the great modern writers.
Postmodern writers (in addition to himself, included with due skepticism),
and the North Americans William Gass, John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme,
Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Outside the United States Barth says that some include Samuel Beckett,
Jorge Luis Borges, the later Nabokov, the authors of the nouveau roman,
Michel Butor, the writers of the Tel Quel group, the Englishman John
Fowles, and the "expatriate Argentine Julio Cort?zar." In addition, Barth
proclaims that he will not associate himself with any literary group in which
Colombian Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez and Italian semi-expatriate ?talo Calvino
are not included. As we shall see, Barth considers these two writers,
especially the first, to be the best exponents of postmodern literature. It
should be evident that, for our purposes, Barth's list is somewhat
confusing, if it places Borges, Garc?a M?rquez, and Cort?zar in the same
category, even though it must be clarified that he speaks of including just
the North American writers, Garc?a M?rquez and Calvino. The other
names have been frequently mentioned by critics.
In summarizing the works of such North American critics as Robert
Alter and Gerald Graff, Barth provides several characteristics of modern
literature. It is principally a criticism of last century's bourgeois social
order and the vision of the world that it promoted. The central artistic
recourse therefore consisted of deliberately inverting the conventions of
bourgeois realism by such tactics as the substitution of the mythical method
for realism, and the manipulation of parallelism between contemporaneity

and antiquity. Echoing Graff, Barth alludes here to what Eliot said with
respect to Joyce's Ulysses. Other recourses were "the radical disruption of
the linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations
concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause-and
effect 'development' thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous
juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical 'meaning' of
literary action." To this he adds "the adoption of a tone of epistemological
self-mockery aimed at the naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the
opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse;
and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the
objective social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie." On his part,
Barth adds two elements to this list: (1) "the modernists' insistence,
borrowed from their romantic forebears, on the special, usually alienated
role of the artist in his society, or outside of it: James Joyce's priestly, self
exiled artist-hero; Thomas Mann's artist as charlatan, or mountebank; Franz
Kafka's artist as anorexic, or bug;" (2) "the modernists' foregrounding of
language technique as opposed to straightforward traditional 'content.'"
According to Barth, modern works are also difficult, creating the need for
professors, or a "priestly industry of explicators, armotators, allusion
chasers, to mediate between the text and the reader." Pas/modern narrative,
according to the professors read by Barth,
merely emphasizes the "performing" self-consciousness and

self-reflexiveness of modernism, in a spirit of cultural
subversiveness and anarchy. With varying results, they maintain,
postmodernist writers write a fiction that is more and more about
itself and its processes, less and less about objective reality and life
in the world. For Gerald Graff, too, postmodern fiction simply
carries to its logical and questionable extremes the anti-rationalist,
anti-realist, anti-bourgeois program of modernism, but with neither
a solid adversary (the bourgeois having now everywhere co-opted
the trappings of modernism and turned its defiant principles into
mass-media kitsch) nor solid mornings in the quotidian realism it
defines itself against.
As can be inferred from his tone, Barth is not completely convinced by

this description of postmodernism, which if accurate would make
"postmodernist writing[.. .]indeed a kind a pallid, last-ditch decadence, of
no more than minor symptomatic interest." For Barth "[t]he proper

program for postmodernism is neither a mere extension of the modernist
program as described above, nor a mere intensification of certain aspects of
modernism, nor on the contrary a wholesale subversion or repudiation of
either modernism or what I am calling premodernism?'traditional*
bourgeois realism." Barth is not overly explicit about the details of his
program. He puts most of his emphasis on the need that postmodern works
be made accessible to a greater number of readers, since the novelties of
modernity "are by now more or less debased common currency," and
because "we really don't need more Finnegan's Wakes or Pisan Cantos,
each with its staff of tenured professors to explain it to us." And, above
all, the postmodern narrative should tell a story. His preferred examples are
?talo Calvino (Cosmicomics) and Garc?a M?rquez (Qne Hundred Years of
Solitude). The latter is "an exemplary postmodernist and a master of the
storyteller's art."
I don't believe that Barth's proposed and discussed schemes are
immediately applicable to Latin American narrative, but they do seem to be
adaptable in an instructive way. There is no doubt in my mind that what
Barth and his sources call modern literature corresponds to the novelistic
trend of the Boom, in particular Cort?zar's Hopscotch (not the stories,
which perhaps would be postmodern), and three novels profoundly marked
by Joyce, Faulkner, and poetry: The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), The
Obscene Bird of Night (1979), and Three Trapped Tigers (1967). The
predominant elements in these novels are breakdowns of the plot, an
emphasis on language and on stream of consciousness, allusiveness, irony,
the self-reflection that inquires as to what literature is. They also feature
notions of the artist as an alienated, priestly, sickly being?Horacio,
Cabrera Infante's trapped tigers, Estrella, Morelli. Bourgeois rationalism is
mocked in these novels, and, in a subjectivism sometimes aided by drugs, a
more profound level of self-knowledge is sought after, along with an
understanding of culture as a superior value which invalidates the false and
alienating manifestations of the post-Industrial society. As such, we would
of course have to admit that there is a delay on the part of Latin American
literature, since it arrives at the Modern, at least in narrative, at a moment
when the postmodern already predominates in North America and in
Europe. It would be better, however, to say that Latin American literature
is simply following the beat of another drummer rather than experiencing a
delay. But in any case, it seems to me plausible to say that the Modern is
equivalent to the Boom, and therefore postmodern is equivalent to the post

Boom.
Now, what version of the postmodern is applicable to the post-Boom,
and in particular to Sarduy? The professorial one or Barth's? I don't
believe them to be antithetical but complementary. What is crucial is the
return to storytelling, to narrativity. I believe that the program of
intensification of Modernism's experiments does indeed lead to a narrative
that increasingly centers around itself and its processes, but contrary to
what was initially thought, this leads to the realization that this kind of
writing also produces narrative, not metadiscourse or knowledge. It seems
to me that this is what occurs in One Hundred Years of Solitude as much as
in the most recent works by Sarduy. What is now irretrievable is the notion
that a metadiscourse exists that a narrative matrix "opens itself," and in
doing so makes possible a profound understanding of literature or the
author. As far as this is concerned, narrative, including the Latin American
post-Boom narrative, coincides with the description of knowledge in the
postmodern era made by Lyotard, who insists on the pre-eminence of
stories, of the narrative in all forms of knowledge.2 The stories are local
matrices of knowledge not connected with superior matrices that explain
either the stories or the matrices. Narrative processes indeed might not be
the whole story of real life, but surely they are part of it. What postmodern
narrative sets out to do is to abolish the nostalgia for totalization. The novel
of the Boom aspired to be total, and even if it failed and made a spectacle of
this failure, the fact remains that the possibility of totalization was an
important factor.
I believe we can now return to Sarduy, to the novel of the post-Boom,
and to the categories I had promised above.
Apotheosis of narrativity. The works of the Boom, in accordance with
what we have just pointed out, and Hopscotch in particular, inhibited the
plot, at times subjecting it to a pulverization that did not allow even the most
tenacious reader to recognize the thread of the story. In Sarduy this stage
coresponds to From Cuba with a Song (1972) and to Cobra. Ever since
Maitreya there has been a return of the plot, of the story, as a backbone
element of the text. The same can be observed in Cabrera Infante, if we
compare Three Trapped Tigers to Infante's Inferno. In the former there are
various narrative threads that may or may not interweave, while in the latter
there is a linear development. The testimonial novels of Barnet and the
works by Puig never practiced the kind of narrative dispersal that we find in
many of the works of the Boom. Now, as we have seen in Colibr?, this
return to storytelling does not in any way mean that there is a return to the
traditional novel. The distinguishing element between traditional and post
Boom narrative lies in the understanding of plot and how it is put together
in these post-Boom works. It is a matter of a difference in narrative
discourse. In the traditional novel the narrative line was guaranteed by the
centralizing presence of an authorial voice that carried the story from one
event to another, explaining how the different parts were intertwined and
making the whole story relate or reflect a series of social values, the most
important being the concept of time and the model of history. The
narrator's voice assures us of why what happens happens. In the novels of
the Boom the authorial voice is fragmented but does not lose its authority,
since the author's figures always embody literary values that suppose a
possible prior or future unity. The chronicler in Terra Nostra is Cervantes;
in Hopscotch Morelli is a theorist of the novel; furthermore, this narrative
presupposes a unity provided by language itself and its capacity to establish
meaningful ties independent of the whole story, as in poetry. In the recent
Latin American novel the concatenation of incidents is produced
independently of any metadiscourse, of any global category that might posit
a meaningful order, including language. When the author appears in the
work, as in The War of the End of the World, that symphony of narrativity,
he does so as one more fictional character without superior powers (he is a
mere journalist, somewhat short-sighted in addition). When he appears in
Colibr?, it is as a painter of "tamed fleas." Furthermore, the story, the
succession, and linking of incidents in these novels is considered
independent of the narrator, as we saw in Colibr?; the story is more
important than language or the narrator.
Absence of metadiscourse. The novels of the Boom, even the most
audacious, contain a critical, literary, political, or cultural metadiscourse.
Hopscotch, for example, displays its own literary theory explicitly
formulated in the "Table of Instructions" and in fragments of "Morelliana."
In addition, Hopscotch is still marked by the great theme of modern Latin
American literature: the search for cultural identity and the definition of
Latin American culture. Oliveira searches for his identity as an Argentine;
the two parts of the novel provide the dialectic of Argentine culture:
Europe-America. From Cuba with a Song fragmented the theme of Cuban
identity into three stories, and in Colibr? Latin American identity is reduced
to a single story that posits Latin American identity as the reflection of a
nature which gives it meaning over and above the story itself. Without the
possibility of totalization, the novel of the post-Boom abandons the
nostalgia of identity, or of culture, as a narrative matrix that might comprise

it and invest it with meaning.
This elimination of metadiscourse is systematically carried out in
Sarduy through the presentation of local religious systems. What Lyotard
identifies at the level of the exchange of knowledge in the postmodern era is
seen in Sarduy by privileging local stories understood as the only possible
sum of knowledge, and therefore as an object of worship. In Colibr? this
reappears, with a less specifically Third World sense to it, by the allusion to
Jim Jones and the Guayana holocaust, a symbol of the outcome of
modernity.
Elimination of ironic reflexivity. The mark of modernity on the works
of the Boom was produced by the much talked-about novelistic reflexivity
that, by including in the fiction the story of how the novel itself is written,
creates an infinitely receding sequence that obliterates the frontiers between
reality and fiction. The author's figure makes a spectacle of his suffering in
the face of such ambiguity, so that his importance diminishes and he is even
cancelled out as the source of creation and ultimate knowledge. The author
is sacrificed to the laws of language or of literature that are superior to him.
The bad faith of the process is clearly evident. The novel of the post-Boom
does not give such a chance for self-immolation to the author, who not only
appears as part of the fiction, but simply as one more character who does
not control the events. Post-Boom narrative in no way allows for the
supposition that the narrator's consciousness is superior to the story itself,
and generally he does not appear as a literary figure. In Sarduy the author's
figures are not only weak, but deliberately ridiculous, as with the pot
smoking director of the Shanghai, in F rom Cuba with a Song, or Colibr?,
who is a painter of tamed fleas. Horacio, Melqu?ades, and even the
characters of Three Trapped Tigers appear freighted with literature.
Sarduy's work parodies the reflexivity of the novel of the Boom that
grounds itself in the almighty figure of the author, a projection of romantic
irony.
Superficiality. There is a deliberate superficiality in the novels of the
post-Boom. Neither the language with its twists and turns, nor the
characters, nor the author's figure, promise depth or profound
understanding. All is color, narrativity, action. This is observed in a great
absence in Sarduy: stream of consciousness. There is no attempt to
represent authorial or character consciousness as prior to language, be it by
means of syntactic breaks, reiterations, or any of the devices bequeathed by
modernity, above all by Joyce and Faulkner. Sarduy's language, like
Plug's, like Barnet's, does not break with the conventions of grammar and
rhetoric. These are the formed and inhabited origins to which one returns
on every journey of self-inquiry.
Yale University
NOTES
1 John Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment," in his The Friday

Book. Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1984),
pp. 193-206.
2 Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979).

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Sarduy, the Boom, and the Post-Boom

In his recent books, Sarduy loses himself in the extravagance of his

of Spanish American literature that originated in part from the author's

m?me , Sarduy is the principal object of analysis in La simulaci?n because

American artists), which links it to the Baroque. Evidently Sarduy's

Of all the transgressions against the Latin American literary tradition in

Can Sarduy's work be seen as a paradigm of the most recent Latin

for realism, and the manipulation of parallelism between contemporaneity

merely emphasizes the "performing" self-consciousness and

As can be inferred from his tone, Barth is not completely convinced by

no more than minor symptomatic interest." For Barth "[t]he proper

equivalent to the Boom, and therefore postmodern is equivalent to the post

nostalgia of identity, or of culture, as a narrative matrix that might comprise

1 John Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment," in his The Friday

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