Which Was the First Novel of the Boom?

Author(s): Donald L. Shaw

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), pp. 360-371
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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 WHICH WAS THE FIRST NOVEL OF THE BOOM?

The periodization of literature is notoriously difficult, partly becaus

pointed out, great writers tend to create their own precursors. Dating
or the end of the Boom in Spanish-American fiction is a case in point
quite as categoric as Alfred MacAdam, who states baldly: 'The Bo
with Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch in 1963 and ended with Jose Donoso'
Bird of Night in I97o.'1 While it hardly seems convincing to squeeze
mere seven years, the idea that the decade of the I96os was the key
movement commands considerable support. Already in I972, in h
novela latinoamericana, Rodriguez Monegal, though dating the start of
of fiction in Latin America from an earlier period, asserts: 'Pero es
donde se advierte la aparici6n masiva de las grandes novelas.'2 M
Philip Swanson, introducing a series of essays on Boom writers, affi
Boom is basically the sudden explosion of literary activity which occ
Latin American writers in the I96os'.3 Similarly, R.C. Boland a
introducing a similar symposium, without agreeing with MacAdam a
major novel, confirm his dating: 'When La ciudady los perros [by Va
the Biblioteca Breve Award in 1962 [sic, for 1963], it signified the e
"boom".'4 For her part, Elzbieta Sklodowska, writing at the same tim
this was the right novel from which to date the beginning of the Boo
that the end of the movement came in the mid I970s.5 Lastly, F
records his belief that the I96os is the crucial decade, but includes the
that for him Roa Bastos's Hijo de hombre, for which he gives the da
for him the first major work of Boom fiction. Sadly, it was published
Not everyone agrees that the I96os mark the start of the Boom. Ind
back at some early criticism of the Boom it is clear that the tenden
origins to the 196os is a recent development. Writing back in 1970,
Rodriguez Monegal both took for granted that the Boom had by
existence for much more than a decade. Vargas Llosa refers to 'the las
and Rodriguez Monegal to 'the last two decades'.7 The latter significa
Asturias, Carpentier, and Marechal among the earliest Boom writers
concurs. Noting that it was Donoso in his Historia personal del B
Anagrama, I972) who had been chiefly responsible for fixing attenti
as the great Boom decade, he comments: 'Al ofrecer una vision l
fenomeno y al situarlo centralmente en la decada de los sesenta, D
una linea divisoria entre lo nuevo pleno y lo anterior que seria un "es
pero donde estan libros de Cortazar, Onetti, Rulfo, Guimaraes Rosa,
obra capital de Borges que tiene mayores vinculos con la nueva narra
1 Alfred MacAdam, 'The Death of Manuel Puig', Review, 43 (I990), 66.
2 Emir Rodriguez Monegal, El Boom de la novela latinoamericana (Caracas: Tiempo N
3 Landmarks in Modem Spanish American Fiction, ed. by Philip Swanson (London: Rou
4 Roy C. Boland and Sally Harvey, 'Magical Realism and Beyond', Antipodas, 3 (19
5 Elibieta Sklodowska, La parodia en la nueva novela hispanoamericana (Amsterdam
p. xiii.
6 Fernando Alegria, Nueva historia de la novela hispanoamericana (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1986),
P. 297.
7 Mario Vargas Llosa, 'The Latin American Novel Today', Books Abroad, 44 (I970), 7-16 (p. I6); Emir
Rodriguez Monegal, 'The New Latin American Novel', Books Abroad, 44 (1970), 45-50 (p. 45).

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 DONALD L. SHAW 36I

otros contemporaneos como Carpentier.'8 Expanding this l

Anderson Imbert had already declared: 'Creo que la novedad
"boom" entre I950 y 1970, consistio en hacer funcionar en
extiende de Mexico a Argentina y de Chile a Puerto Rico los esqu
o desrealizadores de los magos de 1930 a I950.'9 More categori
ridicules the notion that the Boom did not begin until the
superficial review of the matter', he asserts, 'reveals this view
contrary, the I96os was the moment at which the process of
Anglo-American sense) became generally visible and availabl
Latin American writers.' In the previous year, citing in his sup
he had argued strongly in favour of Asturias's Hombres de mai' (
for the honour of opening the Boom.10 Like Sklodowska, he
movement as being reached in the mid-I970s. This all seems to i
there appears to be a certain consensus around the idea that the
Boom was that of the I96os, there is no general agreement
movement began.
The problem is cognate with the one which confronts criti
other movements such as modernismo. If the starting date is p
certain number of major figures have to be presented merely as p
too far back, distinctions begin to be flattened and figures
transitional have to be presented as already fully fledged membe
The crux of the matter in the present instance is whether we se
of this century only a process of gradual intensification of
Spanish-American fiction (in which case, as Anderson Imb
should have to go back at least to the 1930s to find a starting-p
consider that at some point the process produces a recognizable
we have to be prepared to specify where exactly that shift becam
time). If we opt for the latter course there is, as I have indicat
which compete for the honour of setting in motion the Boom pr
include Hombres de maiz (I949), Hijo de hombre ( 959), La ciudady
Rayuela (1963).
There is an often overlooked complicating factor. Severo
Puig have, at least since Rodriguez Monegal's essay of I9
accepted as the two chief transitional writers linking the Boom
Now, Sarduy's first work, Gestos, dates precisely from the yea
ciudady los perros, that is, from 1963, and his best-known wor
cantantes, was published in I967. Similarly, Puig had alrea
between fiction for more sophisticated readers (typical of
reader-friendly fiction (typical of the Post-Boom) by 1968, the d
Rita Hayworth. Also by that date, Antonio Skarmeta, an und
writer, had begun to publish and to win the first of several priz
the beginning of the Boom is dated from 963 (or even from I959

8 Angel Rama, La novela latinoamericana 1920-I980 (Bogota: Instituto Colom

p. 247.
9 Enrique Anderson Imbert, El realismo mdgicoy otros ensayos (Caracas: Monte
10 Gerald Martin, 'Miguel Angel Asturias', in Swanson, pp. 50-73 (p. 54), and
Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1989
Yes: Nueva Novela, No', Bulletin of Latin American Research, 3 (1984), 53-63.

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362 The First Novel of the Boom

the embarrassing fact that the transition to the Post-Boom began conte
raneously in the first case, or very soon thereafter in the second. This surely wi
do.
A feature of the contributions to the discussion so far is the fact that only in
case, that of Sklodowska, does the critic in question attempt to offer any detai
description of what is meant by Boom fiction. Generalizations, of course, aboun
But systematic attempts to tabulate the alleged characteristics of Boom novels
rather few in number. It may be helpful to examine three. In 1981 I offe
tentative list. It took as its point of departure T. E. Lyon's pioneering article o
years beforeTl and attempted to sum up the conclusions of my Nueva narr
hispanoamericana. I postulated the following:
La desaparici6n de la vieja novela 'criollista' o 'teluirica', de tema rural, y la emerg
del neoindigenismo de Asturias y Arguedas.
2 La desaparici6n de la novela 'comprometida' y la emergencia de la novela 'metafi
3 La tendencia a subordinar la observaci6n a la fantasia creadora y la mitificaci6n
realidad.

4 La tendencia a enfatizar los aspectos ambiguos, irracionales y misteriosos de la realidad

y de la personalidad, desembocando a veces en lo absurdo como metafora de la existencia
humana.

5 La tendencia a desconfiar del concepto del amor como soporte existencial y de enfatizar,
en cambio, la incomunicacion y la soledad del individuo. Anti-romanticismo.
6 La tendencia a quitar valor al concepto de la muerte en un mundo que es ya de por si
infernal.

7 La rebeli6n contra toda forma de tab6es morales, sobre todo los relacionados con la
religi6n y la sexualidad. La tendencia paralela a explorar la tenebrosa magnitud de
nuestra vida secreta.

8 Un mayor empleo de elementos er6ticos y humoristicos.

9 La tendencia a abandonar la estructura lineal, ordenada y l6gica tipica de la novela
tradicional (y que reflejaba un mundo concebido como mas o menos ordenado y
comprensible), reemplazandola con otra estructura basada en la evoluci6n espiritual del
protagonista, o bien con estructuras experimentales que reflejan la multiplicidad de lo
real.

Io La tendencia a subvertir el concepto del tiempo cronol6gico lineal.

1 La tendencia a abandonar los escenarios realistas de la novela tradicional, reempla-
zandolos con espacios imaginarios.
12 La tendencia a reemplazar al narrador omnisciente en tercera persona con narradores
multiples o ambiguos.
I3 Un mayor empleo de elementos simb6licos.12

If I had read at the time Jitrik's El no existente caballero,13 I should have added a
reference to a shift in the methods of presentation of fictional characters.
In 1986, J. Ann Duncan reduced this list to seven outstanding features of Boom
fiction:
I Rejection of mimetic realism for an imaginative, symbolic reality, with a stress on the
universal, metaphysical, and mythical, rather than regional and observed.
2 The abandonment of linear structure, with a reduction of actions, biographical details,
and causal sequence, to a minimum.

11 T. E. Lyon, 'Orderly Observation to Symbolic Imagination', Hispania (U.S.A.), 54 (1971), 445-5I.

12 Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana, 3rd edn (Madrid: Catedra, 1985), pp. 218-24.
13 No Jitrik, El no existente caballero (Buenos Aires: Megal6polis, 1975), especially pp. 82-92.

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 DONALD L. SHAW
363

3 A subversion of chronological time.

4 Replacement of the omniscient narrator by multiple or ambiguous narrators.
5 The idea of fixed genres being replaced by hybrid texts that cross generic boundaries and
create a new sort of literature.

6 Linguistic inventiveness as a dominant feature and central to the interrogation of reality,

language becoming the protagonist, with a decrease in the importance of character and
plot.
7 A constant questioning of reality and rejection of definitive solutions or forms, leading to
open-ended novels that develop through the examination of their own form, in which the
reader is co-author, ordering the component parts and creating the work's final form and
meaning.14

Finally, in 1 99 Sklodowska picked out the following characteristic features of the

new novel in Spanish America:
I La sustituci6n del principio causa-efecto por la narraci6n fragmentaria y de la secuencia
por la simultaneidad (non-sequitur, multiperspectivismo, diferenciaci6n tipografica,
trama acronol6gica).
2 La desintegraci6n del personaje y su frecuente reduccion par6dica al estatus de un
antih6roe o un ser marginal.
3 La coexistencia ambigua y conflictiva del orden real con el sobrenatural (imaginaci6n,
fantasia, magia, mito).
4 La activaci6n del lector.
5 El texto concebido como laberinto, rompecabezas, misterio; 'novelas que quieren burlar
el concepto mismo de la novela' (Fernando Alegria).
6 El concepto intelectual y erudito de la escritura en cuanto re-lectura (intertextualidad en
cuanto 'ansiedad de la influencia' en el sentido de Harold Bloom).
7 La inclusi6n de meditaciones metaliterarias en el corpus narrativo.
8 La interpretaci6n del lenguaje no como reflejo, sino como refracci6n arbitraria de la
realidad y, en consecuencia, el ejercicio de la libertad linguiistica por medio de la
vertiginosa experimentacion formal (neologismos, yuxtaposici6n del lenguaje coloquial
y culto, anacronismos,juegos de palabras, sintaxis barroca, etc.).
9 La transgresi6n del regionalismo hacia el nivel mas universal gracias al empleo de ideas
inspiradas por el pensamiento moderno (psicoanalisis, existencialismo, teoria de la
relatividad, estructuralismo linguistico y antropol6gico).
10 El creciente eclecticismo formal vinculado al fen6meno de silva rerum y 'mimesis formal'
(en terminos de Michal Glowinski: influencia mutual entre los medios expresivos de
varias disciplinas, por ejemplo de la sociologia y de la literatura).
11 La preservaci6n de la tendencia critico-social de la narrativa realista tradicional, pero
con mas hincapie que en aquella en la eficacia critica del humor.
12 La sucesiva incorporaci6n - con frecuencia a traves del discurso oral - de las
manifestaciones literarias o culturales anteriormente marginadas (la subculturajuvenil,
la culturajudia, la experiencia femenina). (Sklodowska, pp. xii-xiii).
The common features of these lists seem to be based on one fundamental
assumption: that what above all characterizes the Boom writers is their radic
questioning a) of reality, and b) of the writer's task. This questioning is seen
having led to the rejection of old-style realism, with its simple assumptions about
time and cause and effect, and to its replacement on the one hand by a heightene
sense of the mystery and ambiguity of things, and on the other by greater reliance

14 J. Ann Duncan, Voices, Visions and a New Reality: Mexican Fiction since I970 (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsbur
University Press, I986), p. 9.

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364 The First Novel of the Boom

fantasy and the creative imagination. In addition, new areas of reality, both social
and individual, began to be explored. To express this shifting vision, new and
experimental narrative strategies had to be developed. These included deliberate
abandonment of linear chronological narrative, of conventional character-
presentation, and of obtrusive authorial authority, a much more sophisticated view
than before of the role of language in fiction and, as a general consequence, a greater
tendency towards 'writerly', rather than reader-friendly fiction, often including a
certain challenge to the reader. Among the over-all effects is believed to be that of
lifting Spanish-American fiction to a new level of universality.
The question now is whether, with all this in mind, it is possible to identify a
particular novel which seems to mark the turning-point, some time earlier than
1960. Martin, as I indicated, proposes Hombres de maz' (1949). An equal case could
be made for Marechal's Addn Buenosayres (1948), though its religious dimension puts
it in a somewhat eccentric position vis-a-vis most of the Boom. Carpentier's 'Viaje a
la semilla' (I944) would merit attention, but its author's later work moved away
from that sort of fantasy, leaving it rather isolated. The problem in my view is that
while each of these works is innovatory and experimental in its own way, they tend to
seem more culture-specific than later mainstream Boom fiction. The same is true of
another great novel of the forties, Asturias's El Senor Presidente (1946), despite the
mythical dimension which links it interestingly to Rulfo's Pedro Pdramo (I955). What
they really illustrate is that the decade of the I940s, which was also the decade of
Borges's Ficciones and El Aleph, as Loveluck long ago maintained,15 marked the real
transition from the 'old' to the 'new' in Spanish-American fiction. But it was only at
the end of the I940s that the novel appeared which best fits the major characteristics
of the Boom listed above. That novel was Juan Carlos Onetti's La vida breve (1950).
It is not my intention to re-analyse La vida breve. There are excellent discussions of
its meaning, structure, and narrative techniques by Ludmer, Millington, and
Mattalia among others.16 The present aim is rather to develop the contention that
.this is the first major novel which is no longer transitional but belongs fully to the
new creative pattern. This contention is not new. It was already implicit in
Benedetti's presentation of Onetti in 1969 as the novelist who, above all, broke the
last links with old-style realism in Spanish America. Vargas Llosa in I97I affirmed
in an interview that Onetti, with La vida breve, 'en cierta forma funda la nueva
novela'.17 Kadir, in the last chapter of his book on Onetti in 1977 ('Onetti and the
New Latin American Novel'), followed suit, as did Prego and Petit in I98I.18
Finally, note should be taken ofMattalia's statement that Onetti is properly seen as
'un escritor rupturista, transgresor de la norma, cuestionador del sistema' (p. 104).
She, too, correctly sees the appearance of La vida breve as marking 'un hito
fundamental de la nueva narrativa' (p. 73).

15 Juan Loveluck, La novela hispanoamericana, 3rd edn (Santiago de Chile: Universitaria, 1969), p. 20.
16Josefina Ludmer, Onetti, los procesos de construccidn del relato (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1977); Mark
Millington, Reading Onetti, Liverpool Monographs in Hispanic Studies, 5 (Liverpool: Cairns, I985);
Sonia Mattalia, Lafigura en el tapiz, Colecci6n Tamesis, Serie A: Monografias, 137 (London: Tamesis,
I990).
17 Quoted in Hugo Verani, Onetti, el ritual de la impostura (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1981), p. 94.
18 Djelal Kadir,Juan Carlos Onetti, Twayne's World Authors Series, 469 (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1977),
pp. 140-48; Omar Prego and Maria A. Petit, Juan Carlos Onetti (Madrid: Sociedad General Espafiola de
Libreria, 1981), p. 47.

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 DONALD L. SHAW 365

If the above-listed characteristics of the Boom are ranked in approximate order of

importance, three above all stand out. The first is the shift in attitude towards reality
which enjoyed one of its first manifestations in Borges's basic assertions that 'no
sabemos que cosa es el universo' ('El idioma analitico de John Wilkins', in Otras
inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1952), p. 124) and that 'Los hombres gozan de poca
informacion acerca de los moviles profundos de su conducta' ('Anotacion al 23 de
agosto de 1944', Otras inquisiciones, p. 157). We do not understand the world; we do
not understand ourselves. These assertions constitute Borges's most fundamental
legacy to the Boom. For what he asserted, though expressed negatively, was in
another sense a liberation. If we do not understand space and time, if reality is
'inasible', then the creative imagination can break free of them. The 'real' can no
longer be used to monitor the verisimilitude of works of fiction, standard relations of
cause and effect can no longer be invoked, chronology is no longer fixed.
The second major characteristic follows. If we cannot really know ourselves, what
happens to the writer's ability to create characters? After referring to the shift in
attitude to space and time in the new novel, Carlos Fuentes, in an interview with
John King in 1986, went on to emphasize the sense of the disintegration of the
human personality as the next major factor affecting the writer of contemporary
fiction.19 The third major characteristic equally follows from the first. If the writer is
having difficulties with observing and reporting reality, including that of the self, it is
quite natural for him or her to reflect on the problems during the course of creating
the work of fiction itself, even to the extent of using the processes of writing, on
occasion, as a 'deep theme' of the novel under construction. That is to say, in such
circumstances it is easy for the novel to become self-referential. Most of the other
characteristics of Boom fiction which appear in the lists reproduced above can be
related in some way to these three primary ones. I shall return to some of these others
later. For the moment, the big three offer a good point of departure.
The first chapter of La vida breve is conventionally realistic. As Borges had done in
some of his best short stories, Onetti uses the evocation of an apparently familiar
reality (in this case that of a domestic crisis) as a device not merely for introducing a
major character, Brausen, and giving us some background, but much more impor-
tantly to lull us into accepting what we are reading as normal and unproblematic, so
that we surrender unconsciously to the usual suspension of disbelief and identify
with what is being described. This is rendered all the more easy since the method
employed is first-person narration, always the most vivid and convincing method.
But once the process is under way, Onetti begins to betray the collusive rapport
which he has established between narrator and reader. Brausen starts to imagine
Diaz Grey and the novel begins to bifurcate. A pattern of interior duplication is
established in which Brausen imagines Diaz Grey as Onetti imagines Brausen. The
metaphor is familiar. If we suspect that what we call 'reality' may be no more than a
mental construct, rather than something genuinely existing 'out there' to be more or
less objectively reported, the dividing line between 'observed' and created or
imagined reality becomes blurred. Asturias had already realized this in the mid-
I94os when in Chapter 26 of El Senor Presidente he had asserted that 'entre la realidad
y los suefios la diferencia es puramente mecanica'. But it is La vida breve which first
carries that recognition memorably to its logical conclusion. Mario Benedetti
19 See Moder Latin American Fiction: A Survey, ed. by John King (London: Faber & Faber, 1987),
pp. 142-43.

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366 The First Novel of the Boom

comments: 'El protagonista crea un ser imaginario que se confunde con su exist
y en cuya vida puede confundirse. La soluci6n irreal, ya en el dominio d
fantastico, admite la insuficiencia de ese mismo realismo que parece la r
preferida del novelista y traduce el convencimiento de que tal realismo era, al
cuentas, un callej6n sin salida.'20 The discovery that, as Rodriguez Monegal put
'la unica realidad es la de fabula'21 is what makes La vida breve the founding nov
the Boom. We need only think of other well-known novels published at the sa
time (Revuelta's Los dzas terrenales ( 949), Barrio's Gran Senory rajadiablos
Mallea's Los enemigos del alma (I950), Rojas's Hijo de ladron (I95I)) to see
difference. Only Asturias's Hombres de mazi ( 949) consciously breaks with reali
the same extent, but in a completely different, more americanista direction.
The creation of Santa Maria and the incorporation into it of Brausen and Ern
can be seen, then, as a metaphor of our ebbing confidence in our power to dis
what reality is. In a similar way, the splitting of Brausen's personality into th
Brausen, Arce, and Diaz Grey, is in part a metaphor of the collapse of confide
the unity and consistency of the self. Significantly, in the same year as La vida
Barrios published his last novel Los hombres del hombre, at first sight on a co
theme. But comparison of the two novels shows the depth of the gulf which sep
their respective approaches to the personality. Barrios's view is merely perspe
tic. The separate beings who inhabit his protagonist are no more than embodim
of universal human emotional, psychological, and spiritual states. There is no s
in which they figure forth a crisis or a breakdown of our comfortable sense o
ultimately single and comprehensible self. Quite the contrary; for Barrios's co
dent categorization of what he takes to be eternal aspects of the human psyche
away from what we find in La vida breve. Not for nothing did Onetti himself,
interview with Rodriguez Monegal, compare La vida breve with Cortazar's Ray
saying: 'En ambas [novelas] el problema central es la proyeccion de un individu
otro, su doble.'22 We may not necessarily agree with the statement, but w
interesting is that Onetti regarded the basic theme of his most famous n
equivalent to that of the novel which MacAdam regards as launching the
thirteen years later.
What complicates the metaphor and makes it illustrative of the salto de cali
characteristic of Boom fiction with respect to earlier fiction is that Brausen's
self-projections, Arce and Diaz Grey, do not simply evolve in parallel with hims
the seven 'characters' of Barrios's Los hombres del hombre do with one anothe
instead engage in creative interplay. As Millington perceptively puts it, on th
hand the self comes to be seen not as something relatively static and stable, b
terms of constant change, 'a continual heterogenous process without finality'; o
other, this process is perceived as 'dialectical', involving 'continual contact wit
other [self or selves]' (p. I75). One of the major differences between Boom
pre-Boom fiction is that the latter tended to rely on linearjuxtaposition of even
characters based in the last analysis on the idea of predictability, explicable in t
of causes and effects. In terms of character-drawing, this meant that certain k
motivation were presented as giving rise to given ways of behaving, which in

20 Mario Benedetti, 'La aventura del hombre', in Onetti, ed. byJorge Ruffinelli (Montevideo:
I973), Pp. 2I-47 (pp. 22-23).
21 Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya del medio siglo (Montevideo: Alfa, 1966), p. 237.
22 In Ruffinelli, p. 266.

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 DONALD L. SHAW 367

provided the next series of motivations. By this means plots progressed. To be sure,
as time went on, it became recognized that conscious motivation was not the whole
story. With the unbalanced narrator ofRivera's La vordgine (1924), for example, the
existence of irrational or partly unconscious motivation was quite clearly accepted.
It emerged again, more symbolically in Sabato's Castel in El tunel (I948) and less
centrally in El Pelele in Asturias's El Senor Presidente (1946). But in La vida breve we are
in the presence of something quite new in the Spanish-American novel. In Part in,
Chapter 5, the narrator describes himself as 'Yo, el puente entre Brausen y Arce'.23
That is to say, he is neither one nor the other but an intermediate figure who is, in
any case, soon to be sporadically replaced as a first-person narrator by Diaz Grey.
Neither Arce nor Diaz Grey is an autonomous entity. Brausen creates two new
identities which then interact with his own to create two levels of interior reduplica-
tion, and these function, as in Unamuno and Azorin, to cast doubt, not just on the
comprehensibility of the self but on its very reality. As if to underline the effect,
Onetti introduces himself, still in Part ii, Chapter 5, as an (albeit mute) personage in
the novel. This questioning of conventional characterization is unprecedented in
Spanish America. It prefigures, through examples like Cortazar's collective double
'mis paredros' in 62, modelo para armar and the idea which the same author advocates
of'la ruptura de todo puente logico y sobre todo psicologico',24 the even more radical
experiments with characterization which we reach, for example in Donoso's El
obsceno pajaro de la noche or Fuentes's Terra Nostra.
The third main feature linking La vida breve to the rest of the Boom is the fact that
while Onetti is causing Brausen to create the alter egos and alternative realities
which eventually alienate him even from himself, he is simultaneously reflecting on
what he is doing, in the text itself. In other words, the writing of the novel becomes
part of the action of the novel. The process operates in two ways. On the one hand
what is narrated is not wholly narrated as if it were the 'real' life of Brausen, but
incorporates the 'imaginary' episodes involving Diaz Grey. These, however, re-
elaborate elements borrowed from Brausen's experience, so that in a sense they
comment on the (for Brausen) 'real' episodes which have recently formed part of his
life. As they do, they appear to suggest a certain futile repetition or circularity. That
is, they are more than just casual daydreams; they are functional. But they grow out
of a film-script which Brausen thinks about writing. The character written about by
Onetti, himself writes, and in such a way that what he writes interacts with, and in
the end radically modifies, the original narrative. Furthermore, Diaz Grey in Part i,
Chapter 2 I, intuits the existence of his creator, his dreamer (Brausen), and converts
him into a species of divinity. Where can we find any equivalent of this in
Spanish-American fiction before 1950?
The second way in which the process operates can be seen when we notice that
Brausen not only discusses openly what I havejust mentioned (that is, the creation
of his relationship and the progress of his interactions with Arce and Diaz Grey) but
specifically ascribes a (partly illusory) objective for it all. This is what links the
metaphysical aspect of La vida breve to its creative aspect. Beginning with the title of
Chapter 4, the idea of 'salvation' recurs almost obsessively throughout the novel.
Initially, Brausen's phrase 'Yo podria salvarme escribiendo' (p. 456) could be taken
23Juan Carlos Onetti, La vida breve, in Obras completas (Mexico City: Aguilar, I970), p. 604. All
subsequent page references are to this edition.
24Julio Cortazar, Ultimo round (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, I969), p. io8.

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368 The First Novel of the Boom

to refer simply to his financial salvation, to be achieved by selling the film-scri

Stein. Brausen is, after all, about to lose his job. Later, in Chapter 4 itself, Bra
need is to 'salvarme del desanimo, del clima del amor emporcado, de la Gert
gruesa y mutilada' (p. 459), that is, from his emotional situation. But very quic
we perceive that there is a deeper dimension involved: to write even a first sent
Brausen asserts, 'bastaria para devolverme nuevamente a la vida' (p. 460). W
seems to offer the possibility of salvation from existential anguish and 'desesper
(p. 460). Here Onetti is toying with the Unamunesque and Borgesian idea that o
can somehow challenge death and attain some sort of permanence throug
creative act.
The two key passages, asJ. P. Diaz indicates,25 are Diaz Grey's monologue on the
hotel terrace in Part I, Chapter 2 I, and Brausen's in thefonda in Part ii, Chapter 16.
In both, parallels with religion are extremely explicit. Diaz Grey has already
intuited the existence of Brausen as his creator, his 'God', and, like twentieth-
century Western man, has already rebelled against him. The doctor's reflections are
not easy to follow. Deliberately using religious language ('es mentira que baste la
persistencia en el rezo para que descienda la gracia' and 'Brausen en su huerto'
(p. 562), the latter an allusion to Genesis) he now asserts that the only possible
means of salvation is to become God-like, a totally detached namer (that is, creator
via the word) of reality - but implicitly with no purpose. Alternatively, though he
presents it as the same thing, he needs to become able to accept himself as a
meaningless and purposeless manifestation of the life-force. What Diaz Grey
explicitly rejects in this passage, however, is the idea of salvation via the written
word. Onetti continued to cling to the idea (in Juntacaddveres, for example) that there
was in the task of writing 'algo de salvacion'. But here doubt is cast on it. Brausen
cannot 'save' himself by writing, because Diaz Grey is as much the creator of
Brausen ('timido inventor de un Brausen, manipulador de la inmortalidad'
(p. 562) ) as Brausen is of him. The creative process is circular and futile, bringing
into being no more than an ironic simulacrum of the circular, futile, and unfulfilling
life which it is supposed to infuse with ultimate meaning. Since Brausen is Diaz
Grey's creator, this awareness has not escaped him. Already he has come to see
writing not as a source of'salvation' but simply as 'la maniatica tarea de construir
eternidades con elementos hechos de fugacidad, transito y olvido' (p. 499), and has
recognized in the characters he creates absurd puppets 'afanandose por nada'
(p. 540). In the penultimate chapter of the novel, Brausen, reflecting once again on
his creation of Santa Maria and its inhabitants, reasserts Diaz Grey's notion that the
only way salvation can come is from the realization, via the experience of love and
death, that faith and doubt are irrelevant; only the individual's here-and-now exists.
There is only consciousness of the self as alive; nothing is meaningful beyond that. In
other words, the novel's self-reflectiveness is at once a commentary on art and on life.
Literary creation is a metaphor of all creation; existence as a fiction,al character is
equivalent to existence tout court. This analogy between Creation and the creation of
a text is one which will reappear elsewhere in the Boom, not least in its peak-novel
Cien anos de soledad, where the world of Macondo is the world of a text created by
Melquiades to be deciphered by the last of the Buendias.

25 Jos6 Pedro Diaz, 'La necesidad de lo imaginario', in Juan Carlos Onetti: Papeles criticos, ed. by R6mulo
Cosse (Montevideo: Linardi & Risso, I989), pp. 7-43 (p. I9).

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 DONALD L. SHAW
369

Having suggested that La vida breve already fully illustrates t

teristics of Boom fiction, I now briefly review some of the rem
narrativa hispanoamericana, I laid stress on the strong strain of
commonly runs through Boom novels. It can be ascribed not sim
collapse of existential confidence and the rise of the 'Devil-Wor
wake of Romanticism, but more specifically to three sources: t
loss of confidence in human love as an alternative to religious su
the futility of efforts to change society for the better. It is well es
a biblical subtext underlying sundry Boom novels, from Hijo d
perseguidor, Pedro Paramo, and Cien anos de soledad, to El lugar sin l
the relationship between Boom fiction and the Bible tends to be
inversion, or parody. This is exactly in line with the use of Bra
and Creator which begins La vida breve. Although he does not em
until later ('Padre Brausen que estas en la nada' (La muertey
already assumed it in I950 for Diaz Grey who 'takes his nam
Chapter 2I. I have examined elsewhere the importance of this d
use of religious imagery and symbolism as a classic feature of B
Few features of the Boom better illustrate the shift of s
represents than its radical anti-Romanticism. While sexua
prominently in Boom fiction, love rarely if ever offers a refu
despair, still less a way of conferring meaning on the life of the
more Onetti can be situated at the turning-point, though in
tunel, two years earlier than La vida breve, occupies an importan
speaking. Verani writes correctly of'el fracaso de toda relaci6n
significant feature of Brausen's situation. La vida breve, it should
Spring with a note of hope, a sense that Buenos Aires might su
territorio feraz donde la dicha podria surgir' (p. 437). Soon that
Brausen's wife, Gertrudis; his dream is that she will come to 'g
escribir un nuevo principio' (p. 459). But by Chapter 15 of Part
way to his realization that Gertrudis only represents a part
irretrievable. She too is disenchanted with the relationship
self-regarding relationship with La Queca is even less capable of
clave' (p. 600) that he seeks. Meanwhile, the affair of his alter
Elena Sala is not only platonic but also shot through with ir
her), while the doctor's later relationship with the young violini
however importantly it figures at the end of the text, to suff
Brausen's marriage. Ainsa, in the best chapter of his Las trampas
the problem as that of the inability of Onetti's protagonist
something which grows and changes with time and hence their
fixed absolute which neither wife, nor whore, nor virgin
predominant categories of women in Onetti - can live up to.27
Brausen's inability to achieve a stable emotional relationsh
prefigures the collapse of the love-ideal in the Boom generally. I
the revaluation of love is one of the most visible features of the Post-Boom.

26 In 'Inverted Christian Imagery and Symbolism in Modern Spanish American Fiction', Romance
Studies, o1 (1987), 71-82.
27 Fernando Ainsa, 'La funci6n del amor', in Las trampas de Onetti (Montevideo: Alfa, 1970), pp. 93-121.

13

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370 The First Novel of the Boom

Another feature which distinguishes the Post-Boom from the Boom is the return
to some degree of confidence in the novel's contribution to the social struggle.
Sklodowska is misled by her unwillingness to distinguish between Boom and
Post-Boom into the mistaken assertion, listed above, that 'la tendencia critico-
social' is characteristic of both. But a movement like the Boom, whose basic thrust is
desrealizador, cannot convincingly advance serious social criticism. Though some is
present, in Vargas Llosa for example, in general the Boom writers project their
general pessimism onto the issue of social progress. In this they follow Onetti's lead.
His intellectual heroes are possessed, from Elpozo on, with an overwhelming sense of
the futility and irremediability of things both in themselves and in the collectivity, a
sense which dogs the attempts of later writers too, even when they are on the Left like
Carpentier, to deal in their novels with the possibility of changing society for the
better.
Finally, mention should be made of another feature which links La vida breve in an
important way to subsequent Boom novels: the presence in it of an underlying
mythical pattern. Already present in another way in Tierra de nadie as the quest for
the fantasy-island ofFaruru, here (and later for example in untacaddveres) it takes the
form of a quest for lost youth, for a Paradise Lost.28 But both in La vida breve itself and
in future Onettian novels, the quest-motif loses itself in a circular myth of Eternal
Return in which there is no 'salvation', 'redemption', or 'resurrection', no Paradise
Regained. In this emphasis on the frustration of a mythic quest Onetti joins hands
with Asturias, Rulfo, Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, and Donoso, in all of whose work it
is a recurrent theme.
It has not been the intention here to suggest that La vida breve illustrates every
major aspect of Boom fiction. Indeed, there are at least two important features of
Boom writing which are conspicuously absent from the novel. One is the creative use
of language advocated by writers like Fuentes, for example, who have proclaimed
that a novel is always above all a verbal artefact. Onetti is far from convinced and,
indeed, has strongly attacked this notion.29 The other missing element is any
suggestion in La vida breve that there is or could be any connection between inventar
and conocer. There is no way in which this novel could be thought of performing any
kind of potentially cognitive function such as has sometimes been ascribed to Boom
fiction. Onetti, unlike most of his successors, is primarily a 'declaratory' not an
'exploratory' novelist, and what he declares, rather categorically, is the dreary
absurdity of existence. If the narrator of Juntacaddveres (speaking obviously for the
author) affirms in Chapter 20 that at the precise moment when he writes, things
acquire meaning, he immediately qualifies his statement by adding that it is an
inexplicable meaning. For Onetti, the act of writing does not lead to any real kind of
knowing. Conventional views of reality are questioned, but there are no answers. In
this Onetti stands at the extreme of the Boom's pessimism, but he is not for that
reason outside the movement. Nor, for that matter, does it ever become clear later in
what sense the creative imagination can ever be directly cognitive.

28 See Yvonne Perier Jones, 'Mythic-Symbolic Elements', in The Formal Expression of Meaning in Juan
Carlos Onetti's Narrative Art (Cuernavaca: Cidoc, 197 ) 5. -5.24, and also Beatrice Bayce, Mitoy sueio en la
narrativa de Onetti (Montevideo: Area, 1987), passim.
29 See Juan Carlos Onetti, 'El lenguaje de la nueva novela' (part of an interview with Rodriguez
Monegal), in Ruffinelli, pp. 257-66.

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 DONALD L. SHAW 371

To conclude: while it is indisputedly true th

the Boom, to suggest that the movement
sarily restrictive. It not only excludes novels
(some would argue) Arguedas and Asturias, w
to the Boom, but ignores the turning-poin
marked by the publication of La vida breve.
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA DONALD L. SHAW

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