The Future Of Latin American Fiction

Here's a very interesting paper, The Future Of Latin American Fiction (Part 1, 2, 3, 4). My thanks to Zen In Darkness for sending this to me via email. To use his words: "Some interesting ideas on national identity in fiction, through the experience of writers in Latin America/the lens of 'Latin American literature'." An excerpt:

As the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman pointed out, our continent was not discovered by the Spanish conquerors; it was invented by them. Or, in the best scenario, reinvented in accordance with the dictates of the medieval imagination: a habitat of monsters and prodigies, tropical utopia and tropical hell, a space of our time, refuge of madmen and poets on the borderline of civilization. And even today, when the frontiers of the West are drawn, Latin America is excluded without fear, not withstanding our claim of being, in words of Octavio Paz, an essential portion, although eccentric, of this kingdom (or at least the ”Extreme West” to which the French diplomat Alain Rouquié referred). If no one accepts us in their exclusive club, it is not due to our development problems or our indigenous past, but to the perennial European desire to maintain us as receptacles of their frustrations and wishes, of their fantasies.

This is not the place to discern the academic, petty things that separate ”magical realism” from the ”real wonderful”: it is enough to underline that the artistic category suddenly became a sociopolitical tag for the whole region. The canonic definition establishes that, unlike traditional fantastic literature, where magic or miracles are not lacking, an essential characteristic of the Latin American current is indifference before the extraordinary. A maiden flies on air, and we lift our shoulders; a corpse asks for his father, and we yawn; time runs backwards, and we make a fastidious grimace; children are born with a pig’s tail, and oh, we prefer a soap opera. Since this lack of reason governs us—a lack which in any other place would be considered unnatural and would unleash curiosity, astonishment, or morbid fascination—these events are a mere distraction. When the critics of Cambridge, Harvard, or Paris fill their mouths with the phrase “magical realism”, we imagine a current of socialist realism.