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14.
Ovidiu Mircean & Vlad RomanIntroduction
„
 El padre Rentería se acordaría muchos años después de la noche en que la dureza de su cama lo tuvodespierto y después lo obligó a salir. Fue la noche en que murió Miguel Páramo.
” Comala, the weird place where the protagonist of Juan Rulfo’s
 Pedro Páramo
arrives in search of his father, is nothinglike the villages of lost childhood that the traditional European reader expects, nor it resembles acommon „space of memory” to be reconstructed in a narrative journey. The place is abandoned,derelict and haunted by the voices of his inhabitants which intermingle in an almost absurd play: their meaning is never trully revealed and the hero will find out only towards the end of the novel that allthe characters had died long before his arrival in the fantastic world of Comala.One of the most famous novels of Latin American literature,
 A Hundred Years of Solitude
opens by arewriting of the moment of revelation from
 Pedro Páramo: „Muchos años después, frente al pelotónde fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padrelo llevó a conocer el hielo…
” Macondo is not only the literary inheritance of Juan Rulfo’s Comala, acursed place of evershifting voices, but also the pretext of a distant recall, an almost impossible task of memory, different from its American or European counterparts.If the first decades of the twentieth century represents the epoch of technical innovations in terms of narrative perspective, voice and expressions of de-centered subjectivity, its achievements will trigger also a dead-end of the classical „story” and of the historical functions of plot and „character”. The boom of Latin American Literature initiated in the late 50s seems to meet the expectations of a1
 
generation of famished readers craving for storytelling and later on enthrilled by the explosion of epicevents in the novel. But no matter how relevant this stylistic change might be for the American or theEuropean reader, one cannot ignore the insularity of the fantastic spaces that the Latin American fictioncreates. Beyond the historical truth, the realistic conventions of storytelling or the limits of the self-reflexive literary language, these narratives configure cultural identies and define a new cultural space.An authentic particularity of the Latin American culture definitely exists. Yet, to identify it becomes asdifficult as structuring ultimate values for too large a space or a history. Crossing the remains of boththe „Europe de la Renaissance” and the metis cultures belonging to a great number of vernacular  peoples, Latin America experienced overflowing fluctuations in social, historical and artistic life. Atthe beginning of the XXth century, Latin American literature became one of the pillars of worldliterature, represented by works of extreme narrative invention, social, cultural or political issues thatreshaped everything Europe had known. Magic realism, which is the oversaturated reality of LatinAmerica brought into fictional works, is a concept that does not comprise this reality, though it impliesit. Rather, it suggests that the logic of our world is to be transferred, as a new logic, to these texts of explosive imaginary.The cultural space of Latin America sets an almost chaotic esthetic territory of vaste dimensions, between the boundaries of oblivion in
One hundread Years of Solitude
and
 Fuňes
of Borges. The bibliography related to the issue is numerous. The fluid space of fiction, equally rich, is always to bediscussed. Considering it implies the effort of a broad vision. This volume,
The Latin American Novel 
,discusses the specific items of this area both from a theoretical point of view, willing to studythoroughly the place of these narratives in the wider cultural imaginary, and from an analytic point of view following the way these aspects of imaginary become real inside the fictional worlds. 
Cornelia Vlad
“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 
Latin America and the Fascination of the Short Story
 
Abstract
: Latin America defines its essential identity at the intersection between Reason and Myth,where the sacred, magical element retrieved within the Indo-Afro-Hispanic roots is joined by therealist element inherited from the Renaissance tradition. The roots of the short story blend with theones of mythology and are found in the pre-Columbus cultures. This legendary material is recordedinitially in chronicles or compilations, later adapted into collections of stories, further refined, andultimately reinterpreted by the works of contemporary writers. It is magic realism that re-establishesthe importance of this discourse of differentiation and imposes it globally, within the process of  perfecting the European tradition. The so-called
“Boom”
 period, characterized by the explosion of thenovel (Márquez, Llosa, Fuentes) was prepared by several essential short story collections like Borges’
 Ficciones
or Cortázar’s
 Bestiario
. Also, all the accomplished novelists of this period wrote short2
 
stories and were preoccupied to elucidate the mechanism of prose writing and the function of storytelling. The
“Boom”
 phenomenon coincides with an international awakening of interest inwomen’s voices, which will further increase in the last decades of the twentieth century (IsabelAllende, Luisa Valenzuela, Elena Poniatovska). The
“Post-Boom”
generation is considered to be a“local” representative of postmodernism, and introduces a new type of literature that is primarilycharacterized by accessibility. The postmodernist short story features a variety of styles: parody,introspection, grotesque, or fantasy, and determines literary criticism to elaborate new strategies of itsinterpretation. The “mini-short story”, defined as a sub-category of the contemporary South Americanshort story, becomes the image of a nonconformist attitude toward the orthodox construction of thetraditional story.
Keywords
: Latin American Short Story; Magic Realism; Feminism;
“Boom
and
“Post-Boom”
 prosefiction. „América, antes de ser descubierta, ya había sido inventada en el sueño de una búsqueda utópica, en lanecesidad europea de encontrar un „ la bás”, una isla feliz, una ciudad de oro. […] Eternamente dual,la cultura latinoamericana propone sus imágenes conflictivas como verdaderas absolutas.”Carlos Fuentes Throughout history, this complex territory full of contradictions, where the most varied aspectsof a paradoxical reality are entwined, has impregnated its inhabitants with the need to define their essential identity. While 20th century Western thought utilized, often abusively, the scientific,empirical approach to reality (to the detriment of the analogue, sapient approach) and thus enhancedthe transfer of the sacred realm of epiphany toward the subconscious and its consolidation inside non-actualized mythological forms, the fictional worlds proposed by the works of Latin American writersreactivate precisely those magic-mythic ways of knowledge and launch the possibility of recuperatingthe shattered Whole.The series of historical coincidences that has existed serves to explain, in part, the blissfulcohabitation of Reason and Myth on this territory. The sacred, magical element retrieved within theIndo-Afro-Hispanic roots through a process of “transculturación narrativa,” as described by AngelRama , is joined by the realist element inherited from the Renaissance tradition, which flourished inthe 17th century. This latter inheritance permits the awareness of these defining features that belong tothe cultural phenomenon known as
mestizaje
.The roots of the South American “cuento” blend with the ones of mythology and are to befound in the pre-Columbus cultures: the Maya narrative (
tzolkan
), the Inca storytelling (
huahuaricuni
),and the Aztec oral tradition (
tlatolli
).While Christianity was still in the very early stages, Central America invented its calendar andits writing, organized its gods in a unique mythology, and created an oral literature to be discoveredlater on in codices and documents. A thousand years later, when the Spanish arrived, they encounteredan elaborate indigenous pantheon which, despite the constant threat of the Catholic Church, managedto survive in the collective memory along with old narratives. Some of the European newcomers3
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