Larsen. The Boom Novel and Cold War in Latin America

CHAPTER FIVE
The "Boom" Novel and the Cold

War in Latin America
i
One of the collateral if perhaps somewhat fortuitous benefits of the cur-
rent preoccupation with postmodernism in the humanities is that it has
Copyright © 1995. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
now become much more difficult to sustain what was for decades the dom-
inant mode of apology for modernism itself and the underlying ideology
of its "canonicity": the idea that modernism and modermYy were consub-
stantial categories, that modernism was somehow already precontained in
the raw and immediate experience of contemporary life. To defend, say,
the Joycean interior monologue or the surrealist principles of montage it
was once necessary only to declare the fidelity of the aesthetic device to
"modern" life itself. Modernism had succeeded, for a time at least, in lay-
ing ideological claim to being the realism of our (or its) time. Given this fun-
damental premise, one might or might not concede the existence of a mod-
ernist "politics." But even supposing one did, such a politics tended to be
viewed as likewise consubstantial with "modernity" as such, rather than,
say, as the expression of some particular group or even class interest. Above
all, one thinks here of the Adornian and generally left-formalist theory of
aesthetic negation as constituting a new sphere for emancipatory activity
after the decline of "politics" in its traditional modes.
64
Larsen, Neil. Reading North by South : On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics, University of
Minnesota Press, 1995. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=310324.
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THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 65
Although one can still encounter serious efforts to produce a theory of

modernism as both a lived immediacy and as a kind of teleological neces-
sity (see, for example, Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air)
this sort of thinking must now confront the sense among intellectuals and
cultural consumers generally that modernism has failed to keep its Utopian
promises — and that contemporary experience may not after all be of a
piece with modernist aesthetics.1 For some, no doubt, the same premise of
consubstantiality now restates itself, mutatis mutandis, as the relationship
of postmodernism to posftnoderm'f}'. But modernist burnout has also made
it easier to begin to think about the politics of modernism without in turn
feeling obliged to erect modernism into a metapolitics with its own unique
pertinence to contemporary experience. Perhaps, after all, modernism did
serve the interests of some while effectively thwarting those of others. And
perhaps there were, or are, other modernities, unexpressed and unsuspected
in canonically modernist aesthetic categories and practices. In any event,
the relation of modernism to both modern experience and to other aes-
thetic and cultural practices has come increasingly to be seen as hegemonic
and exclusionary rather than transparent and totalizing.
One of the many areas opened up for critical investigation by this line
of thinking is the historical connection between modernism and the anti-
communist politics of the Cold War. (In precise fact, this connection was
already being drawn by, among other Old Left intellectuals, the Lukacs of
the early 1950s [see, inter alia, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism and
the epilogue to The Destruction of Reason]. But the — as one might put
it—one-two punch of Cold War thinking itself, together with the gener-
ally promodernist stance of the New Left, had until recently kept this ques-
tion outside the limits of acceptable discourse.) Serge Guilbaut, in How
New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, argues, for example, that the rise of
Abstract Expressionism in the United States after World War II was less the
result of some spontaneous shift of aesthetic sensibility on the part of artists
and critics than the product of a self-consciously political drive to decan-
onize the old Popular Front realism of the 1930s and replace it with a de-
politicized art compatible with the U.S. imperial elite's new image of itself
as the guardian of aesthetic culture.2 A similarly political connection is un-
covered in Lawrence H. Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputation? Here,
Schwartz analyzes the shift in Faulkner's literary fortunes from relative ob-
scurity in the 1930s and early 1940s to the superstardom of the 1950s and
after as a function of the same Cold War cultural campaign to delegitimize
the left-leaning social and proletarian realism that thrived in the pre-Cold
66 THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR
War United States through the creation of a new, distinctly "apolitical" and
purportedly authentic "American" novelist. Guilbaut and Schwartz em-
phasize the key role played in both instances by the New York Intellectuals
gathered around the Partisan Review, as well as, in the case of Faulkner, by
New Critics such as Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks. James Murphy, in his
recent and valuable study The Proletarian Moment, argues similarly that
the current neglect of the proletarian fiction of the 1930s stems directly
from an institutionalization of the politically aggressive promodernism of
the New York Intellectuals.4 And one should note here as well Barbara Fo-
ley's important new reading of the North American proletarian novel itself
(see Radical Representations) in which she has shown that the initial recep-
tion of works by authors such as Erskine Caldwell, Josephine Herbst, Mike
Gold, and Richard Wright, not only by left-wing but by more "mainstream"
critics as well, was generally enthusiastic.5 If this major body of literature,
stigmatized for its supposed aesthetic crudity and propagandism, later lan-
guished in the shadow of modernists such as Faulkner, this, she shows, was
at least as much a result of the Cold War conversion of formerly friendly
critics and publishers as it was of any properties intrinsic to the novels
themselves.
What these and other studies point to is certainly not, let it be said, a
conspiracy theory of modernism as an anticommunist plot but rather to
the tendency for cultural and literary institutions on the "Western" side of
the Cold War divide to promote the canonization of modernist works —

many of which long predated or had no direct relationship to the aggres-
sively anticommunist policies of the post-World War II years. These works
suited the cultural dictates of the Cold War not so much for what they said
or represented but for what they did not say or represent, for their scrupu-
lously maintained neutrality as purely self-referential languages of form,
or what Guilbaut calls their "political apoliticism." The politics of the Cold
War do not create modernism. To suppose this would be to fall into an ob-
vious historical fallacy. But it bears considering whether or not it is the
politics of the Cold War that create the institutional and cultural forces
that in turn have inculcated into several generations, including my own,
the creed of a modernist consubstantiality with contemporary life — of mod-
ernism, even, as historico-aesthetic telos.
The question I wish to pose in the present essay is whether or not
something analogous to the aesthetic-political change traced by Guilbaut,
Schwartz, Foley, and others in the United States takes place in Latin America.
More particularly, can a correlation be drawn between the global ideological
THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 6/
demands of the Cold War, above all the elevation of anticommunism into
a virtual touchstone not only for political but for virtually all cultural prac-
tice as well and the canonization of Latin American modernism, especially
modernist narrative?
Straightaway, however, some clarification is required. "Modernism" is
in some ways an unaccustomed term in the sphere of Latin American liter-
ary discourse. Its Spanish cognate— modernismo—refers to a literary move-
ment appearing in Spanish America at roughly the turn of the century,
mainly in poetry, and with affinities for French symbolism and Parnas-
sianism. By any account, however, modernismo would have to be deemed
a pre- or at best protomodernist phenomenon, if the more Eurocentric
or metropolitan designation is maintained. Vanguardismo probably comes
closest to translating the English term. But the lexical difficulty aside, there
remains the question of whether there is a Latin American modernism di-
rectly assimilable to some metropolitan, or would-be global, modernist
canon. Much of Latin American critical debate over the last three to four
decades has dwelled on this general issue, often claiming that such an as-
similation does considerable violence to a modern Latin American body of
literature that, while not quite outside the orbit of canonical modernism,
nevertheless turns on its own unique substrate of contemporary, lived ex-
perience. For a time, the preferred term became "magical realism," in ref-
erence to a mode of literary narrative that, while resembling modernism in
its penchant for formal experiments, also differed from it by virtue of its
purportedly mimetic relationship to a Latin American reality that was said
to exceed traditionally realist modes of representation.6
But with the proviso that its Latin American variant typically declares
its autonomy of form having first declared its autonomy of content, I think
it can be agreed that, at least in the narrative sphere, a Latin American
modernism has its origins in the works of authors such as Borges, Mario
de Andrade, Asturias, Carpentier, Rulfo, and Guimaraes Rosa. There can
also be little dispute that the so-called boom phase of Latin American fic-
tion that, beginning in the 1960s, follows on the work of the latter — com-
prising works by, inter alia, Fuentes, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, and Garcia
Marquez— fully merits the modernist designation. Indeed, as Gerald Mar-
tin has recently written, the "boom" should be regarded not only as the
"product of the fiction that had gone before" but even more so as the "cli-
max and consummation of Latin American Modernism."7
But I would, in fact, go even further and maintain that it is only after the
onset of the "boom," and the vastly enhanced visibility of its representative
authors and works both within the Latin American ambit itself and inter-
nationally, that the pre-"boom" modernists themselves come to be tacitly
regarded as belonging to a uniform literary current. It is now a standard
"truth" of Latin American literary historiography that without a Borges,
no Cortazar, without a Rulfo or Asturias, no Garcia Marquez, and so on.
From a certain narrowly philological standpoint, this is undeniably true.
But the effect of the genealogy here is not only to register the inheritance
per se but also to make it appear to be the fulfillment of a kind of literary
destiny: we needed Rulfo so that we could get a Garcia Marquez, thus real-
izing the true latent possibilities of the Latin American literary genius.
That is: the "boom," if I am right about its effective success in rewriting
Latin American literary history with itself as telos, might be seen as achiev-
ing, vis-a-vis its literary prehistory, what the rise of Faulkner, or of Ab-
stract Expressionism, achieve in their respective North American spheres:
the decisive and a priori exclusion from (or marginalization within) the
canon of nonmodernist works, movements, and so on.
But does this elevation of modernism to a hegemonic position likewise
obey, even if only indirectly, a Cold War political logic? Here the analogy
to North American developments appears much more problematic. Cer-
tainly, the standard theories of the "boom" would not appear to support
such a view. These theories can, very schematically, be classified as belong-
ing to three different types. The first, and probably still the most com-
monly alleged theory may be termed the aesthetidst. Typically advanced by

the "boom" authors themselves, the aestheticist account of the "boom" ex-
plains it as simply the discovery of a new literary language in which to ex-
press Latin American reality with, for the first time, complete authenticity.
Cortazar, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa all made notorious pronouncements
to this effect, and there has been no lack of critics to echo it back. But we
would scarcely expect to find any emergent historical or political critique
of modernism in this version of the "boom" since, in keeping with what
is obviously its own modernist self-understanding, the aestheticist theory
takes as its point of departure the idea of an immanent formal rupture that
must, finally, be accepted on faith. Any attempt at a historical or political
explanation of this aesthetic rupture would only rob it of the claim to for-
mal immanence. Moreover, even if one were inclined to give some cre-
dence to it, it would have to be observed that the formal "revolution" had
already in large measure been carried out by pre-"boom" modernists such
as Borges, Asturias, and Guimaraes Rosa.
THE 'BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 69
A second theory of the "boom" that has gained some currency holds
that, as the term "boom" itself implies, the "aesthetic" revolution was re-
ally nothing more than a major expansion of Latin American literary com-
modities into domestic and international markets. Its best-known advocate
has been Angel Rama, whose essay "El 'boom' en perspectiva" (The 'boom'
in perspective) remains one of the most informative pieces of criticism
ever to be written on the subject. Here Rama equates the "boom" with the
emergence in Latin America of a larger reading public, together with the
production and the marketing tools required to service it. The "boom"
marks the "absorption of literature within the mechanisms of consumer
society," and along with it the appearance of the author not only as profes-
sional but as media star.8
This is certainly a useful corrective to the aestheticist myth, but it will
likewise not take us very far in the exploration of the links between the
"boom" novel and the global politics of the Cold War. Rama regards the
political orientations of the "boom" authors — ranging, at different times,
from socialist to liberal to conservative—to be, by reason of this very plu-
rality, of secondary importance. What mattered was exclusively the new
reading public; the "boom" novel was such by virtue of its ability to com-
mand this new market, to supply it with a set of self-images that, for what-
ever reason, met a preexisting demand. That is, Rama here adopts what
might be called the vulgar sociological standpoint, according to which phe-
nomena such as market trends, demographic shifts, and changing consump-

tion and work patterns are separated from questions of both politics and
aesthetics. (This, of course, is not by any stretch to imply that Rama's work
as a whole is limited to such a standpoint.)
Finally, there is the theory that sees the "boom" novel as the literary
manifestation of the new political consciousness generated in Latin Amer-
ica by the Cuban Revolution. This we might designate the revolutionary-
historicist tendency. The Colombian critic Jaime Mejia-Duque, for exam-
ple, concedes the significance of both the purely formal and the commercial
aspects of the "boom," but regards these as "overdetermined" by the new
political reality supposedly inaugurated in 1959.9 The fact that, particu-
larly after the Padilla affair of 1971, many of the "boom" authors withdrew
their initial support of the revolution demonstrates the "constitutive am-
biguity" of the politics of the "boom" but does not negate the objective
historical connection.10 The "boom" is, in Mejia-Duque's words, "something
exterior to [the] revolution, but not foreign to it" (ibid.; my translation)."
70 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR
More recently Gerald Martin, while not discounting the "market" theory,
has taken a similar position, seeing the "boom" as
a confused and contradictory moment, marked deeply by the Cuban
revolution— The sense of diverse ideological alternatives offered by Cuba
and the various social democractic experiments of the day, combined with
the new cosmopolitanism bred by a consumption-oriented capitalist boom
and an expansion of the Latin American middle classes (nouveau read?) —
buyers and consumers of novels—created a period of intense artistic activity
throughout the subcontinent. (Journeys through the Labyrinth, 204-5)
Within this theoretical trend there might also be included those more neg-
ative assessments of the "boom" — see, for example, Fernandez Retamar's
Caliban—that indict the "boom" novelists as being too "exterior" to the
revolution—but without ceasing to insist on the Cuban experience as the
historical precondition for the aesthetic developments as such, however
they are to be evaluated.
From the standpoint of basic methodology, it is this latter, revolution-
ary-historicist approach to the "boom" that I think brings us closest to the
complex truth of the phenomenon itself. Here, at least, in contrast to the
aestheticist approach, an effort is made to historicize and politicize mod-
ernist aesthetic categories, but without thereby succumbing to the vulgar
sociological tendency to treat the aesthetic aspect as intrinsically arbitrary.
But the insistence on the Cuban Revolution as the principal historical de-
terminant of the "boom" novel has always seemed somewhat dubious to

me. The profound subjective impact of the revolution and the events it
unleashed on Latin American intellectuals and artists certainly cannot be
denied. And in a sense it is through Cuba, especially post-1961, that the
Cold War exerts its most direct influence on Latin America. But how does
one proceed from the anti-imperialist, and later would-be socialist, revo-
lution to the modernist "revolution" in literary form (or, if one prefers, the
uncontroversially capitalist revolution in book publishing and marketing)
without converting the analogous term here into the thinnest of abstrac-
tions? Such a notion does not answer but merely begs the questions: what
was there particularly "modernist" in the Cuban Revolution, and what par-
ticular anti-imperialist or socialist objectives were furthered through the
consecration of modernist narrative as the authentic mode of contempo-
rary Latin American literary expression?
In this regard it will be useful to give an account of still another critical-
theoretical approach to the "boom," in this case belonging to the Latin
American historian Tulio Halperin Donghi. In his wonderfully incisive and
THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR /I
lucid essay "Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas en la

decada del sesenta" (The new narrative and Spanish American social sci-
ences in the 1960s), Halperin notes the curious contradiction between the
initially pro-Cuban, and generally radical anti-imperialist, stance of the
"boom" authors and the fact that the same authors "elaborate a literature
that scarcely alludes to the dramatic conjuncture from which it stems"
(149)." The "boom" novel, according to Halperin, "rests on a renunciation
of a certain image of the reality of Spanish America as historical, that is, as
a reality collectively created through a temporal process whose results are
cumulative" (150). He attributes this renunciation in part to the fact that
attempts to create a historical novel in Latin America had been predomi-
nantly the work of the pathological-determinist view of history embodied
in naturalism — a view that, given the political effervescence of the 1960s,
could only seem perversely out of date. But the "boom," in Halperin's ac-
count, answers naturalism not with a deeper historical realism but rather
with an adoption of "new techniques," that is, with modernism. This, in
the politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, leads to the "paradox" that
"this literature, neither militant nor escapist, and seeming to evoke what
was once viewed as Spanish America's historical calvary as if its governing
fatalities had entirely lost their potency—this literature is nevertheless rec-
ognized as being the most akin to a mass readership increasingly militant
in spirit" (154). And he continues:
The readers of Garcia Marque?, were those who found it easy to believe that
a landowner from Rio Grande, educated in the political school of gaucho
factional disputes and in the no less ambiguous one of populism, was in
fact the unexpected Lenin required by his country to lead the revolution to
victory, or that the Chilean propertied classes were prepared to swallow,
and even savor as delectably traditional in flavor, the revolutionary
medicine wisely prescribed for them by Dr. Allende. (155)
But, continues, Halperin, alluding to the violent military repression of the

1970s, "there is no need to be reminded of what bloody horrors were ef-
fectively required in order to destroy a set of illusions too pleasing to be
easily renounced; 'magical realism' now appears as an echo of a time in
Spanish America whose magic those horrors have dispelled for ever" (ibid.).
With some extrapolation, the emergent picture here is that of a mod-
ernism that, while remaining, as the Old Left might have put it, "right" in
essence, nevertheless finds itself for a time in the peculiar historical con-
juncture of being "left" in appearance. Unlike its North American ana-
logue of roughly a decade earlier, this modernism refuses the mantle of
/2 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR
"political apoliticism" and, at least at first, openly encourages an image of

itself as somehow engage. Why? Perhaps because, putting it bluntly, the
Latin American "boom" modernist is an anti-yanqwi nationalist before he
or she is an anticommunist. When the populist illusions of the 1960s are
dispelled by the brutal reaction of the 1970s in Latin America (in fact the
death of Che in 1967 can be taken as the symbolic inauguration of a pe-
riod of counterinsurgency and repression that begins as early as 1964 in
Brazil) the seeming right/left aphasia of the "boom" vanishes with it. (It is
at this point, some have argued, that the moment of the "boom" passes,
giving way to that of the more politically motivated "testimonio," or "testi-
monial novel.")12 But Halperin adduces another factor here as well. This is
that, again in contrast to the North American situation, the modernism of
the "boom" appears to answer not the elite need to counterhegemonize a
tradition of increasingly left-tending realism but rather the outwardly pro-
gressive impulse to overcome a much older tradition of naturalistic por-
trayal in Latin America. It was in and through this tradition — stretching,
conservatively, from Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo to the novels
of the Mexican Revolution and even, perhaps, into Spanish America's scat-
tered experiments with "socialist realism" itself—that the neocolonial intel-
ligentsia had articulated its deep-seated pessimism regarding the capacity
of the masses to overcome their purportedly pathological "backwardness"
and usher Latin America onto the threshold of modern civilization. In nov-
els as otherwise diverse as Cambaceres's En la sangre, for instance, and Re-

vueltas's El luto humano—the former a frankly reactionary screed, the lat-
ter a supposedly progressive, even revolutionary one—there operates much
the same reduction of human agencies in Latin America to the irresistible
working out of a naturally, even racially or biologically predetermined trag-
edy. It is against this background, Halperin argues, that the flight from his-
torical portrayal into the modernist "boom" novel's Utopias of form and
language can appear liberating. The key factor in Halperin's own rather
tragic view of Latin America's literary destiny, however, is that the moment
of authentic, historical realism is missing. While, in Halperin's view, the
Latin American social sciences do effect a rupture with naturalist histori-
cism — for which he above all thanks the pathbreaking work of the Peru-
vian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui — no such breakthrough occurs in lit-
erature. If the "boom" enacts a "revolution," it remains, for Halperin, a
"Revolucion Boba" — a "fool's revolution," that "solves" the basic difficulty
by resolutely turning its back on it (164).
THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 73
II
But is the literary breakthrough into a modern historical realism in fact an

unrealized moment in Latin America? Here I think that Halperin, although
correct insofar as the particular "boom" authors he has in mind do not
work either out of or against such a tradition of realism, nevertheless risks
error by omitting what may be one of the grand exceptions to the rule
here — the literature of Brazil. To be sure, the naturalist tradition finds as
firm an anchor here as elsewhere in Latin America. One thinks, above all,
of Euclides da Cunha's vastly influential work Os sertoes. So, indeed, does
modernism, as witness the examples of a Mario de Andrade or what is
perhaps the Joycean urtext of Latin American modernism, Joao Guimaraes
Rosa's Grande sertao: veredas. But then what does one do with a Machado
de Assis? One might argue the case for a nineteenth-century anomaly here,
perhaps, were it not for the strong claims to realism attributable in turn to
a whole series of twentieth-century authors as well, among them Lima Bar-
reto, Rachel de Quieros, Graciliano Ramos, and Jorge Amado.
Without at this point exploring any further the case to be made for a
Brazilian exceptionalism, I do nevertheless wish to devote additional con-
sideration, in light of my original query regarding modernism and the Cold
War, to one of these authors in particular — namely, Jorge Amado. My rea-
sons for this are several. First, I would maintain that Amado's narrative fic-
tions of the 1940s and 1950s, specifically from Terras do sem fim in 1943
until publication of Gabriela, cravo e canela in 1958, represent one of the
greatest achievements of modern historical realism in Brazil — if not in
Latin America as a whole. To say this is not to discount the serious flaws
that distort some of these works, perhaps especially his more orthodox so-
cialist realist novels (Seam vermelha and the urban trilogy Os subterraneos
da liberdade). These flaws notwithstanding, however, I think Amado's
work of this period effectively refutes the postulate of Latin America as
condemned to choose between a naturalist, pathological realism and a mod-
ernist antirealism.
This is not the place to engage in a lengthy analytical presentation of the
sources and specific configuration of Amadian historical realism. Suffice it to
suggest here that Amado's intense personal involvement in the class struggles
that lead up to the "revolution" of 1930 and subsequently usher in the
period of the fascist-inspired "New State" of Getulio Vargas, together
with his strong literary debts to Brazil's "Northeastern," and distinctly
74 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR
antimodernist, school of rural proletarian realism, are what ultimately

make possible the qualitative departure of a work such as Terras do sem
fim, together with its sequel in the "cacao cycle," Sao Jorge de llheusr. that is,
the fully epical portrayal of Brazil's evolution, out of a state of semifeudal
land tenure and rural clientelism (the Brazilian term is coronelismo] into
one of modern, dependent capitalism. What, in the naturalist tradition,
presents itself as the iron subjugation of human agency to the prehistorical
factors of environment and "race" — and, in the later "boom" novel ap-
pears as the "magical" incongruity of life in the traditional, "backward"
sector with the other, increasingly urbanized and hypermodern Latin Amer-
ica— emerges in Amado's fiction as the economically determined distor-
tion suffered by human beings who do live in thrall, not to "nature" but to
commodities, in this case, to a single export commodity: cacao. Amado is
obviously not the first, or the last, Latin American novelist to grasp the re-
ality of neocolonial, dependent capitalism. But he is, I would argue, one
of, if not the, first to discover the most effective artistic means for portray-
ing this reality as something fully historical and dynamic — as, in the final
analysis, the cumulative product of human agencies.
This fact alone makes Amado an interesting foil to the various versions
of the "boom." But there is still another reason for bringing Amado into
the picture here. And that is that Amado himself undergoes a suspiciously
"boom"-like transformation at a very discrete moment not only in his own
literary and political career but in Cold War historiography as well.

The story merits telling in some detail.'3 Amado had spent the latter
half of the 1930s in militant opposition to the Vargas dictatorship, an op-
position that resulted in several jailings, in exile, and even in the public
burning of his works in the capital of his native Bahia province, Salvador.
In the 1940s he formally joins the Brazilian Communist Party and is elected,
in 1945, to the Chamber of Deputies on the Party slate. Renewed repres-
sion sends him into a European exile in 1948, from which he is not to re-
turn until 1952. In 1954 he publishes the militantly socialist realist trilogy
of underground life under Vargas, Os subterraneos da liberdade.
In February of 1956 there occurs an event, however, that was to shake
not only Amado's political convictions but the ideological foundations of
the international communist movement of the time: Khrushchev's "se-
cret" speech denouncing Stalin, delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress
of the Soviet Communist Party. The speech itself turns out to be a vague,
obviously self-serving harangue in which Khrushchev advances the absurd
thesis that all the ills of Soviet society up to the present moment are to be
blamed on the individual Stalin and the mystical "cult of personality" that
he had somehow been able to instigate. But few, if any, party loyalists around
the world seem to have been in a position to perceive this at the time,
awed, as most were, by the supreme political and ideological authority of
Khrushchev himself. In fact, I would propose, this becomes a turning point
not only for international communism but for the conduct of the Cold
War itself, insofar as the "East," still represented by the USSR (the Sino-
Soviet split, although brewing, is still some seven years away), now adopts
an increasingly defensive, conciliatory position in the face of the "West's"
unrelentingly aggressive anticommunism. (A few years later, Khrushchev
promulgates the doctrine of "peaceful coexistence" between socialist and
capitalist states.)
Amado is, by all accounts, devastated by the sudden political turn. His
personal friend and fellow communist Pablo Neruda records in his mem-
oirs that the "revelations [in Khrushchev's speech] had broken Amado's
spirit— From then on he became quieter, much more sober in his atti-
tudes and his public statements. I don't believe he had lost his revolution-
ary faith, but he concentrated much more on his literary work, and elimi-
nated from it the directly political aspect that had previously characterized
it."14 For several months after the speech, Amado maintains a political si-
lence. Then, in October of 1956 he publishes a letter in a Brazilian party
newspaper calling for open discussion of the Khrushchev report and con-
demning the "cult of personality." Although he remains a party member,

from this point on Amado begins to withdraw from political life and, as
Neruda noted, devote all his energies to his literary career.
The result, published in 1958, is the novel for which he is still probably
best known: Gabriela, cravo e canela. Set, like the earlier "cacao cycle" in
the southern Bahian port of Ilheus, Gabriela is the ludic, mock-epical and,
as some have termed it, "picaresque" love story of Nacib, a local Syrian
merchant, and the novel's heroine, a beautiful "cinnamon"-skinned refugee
from the drought-stricken Northeast whom Nacib first hires to be his cook.
Through the vagaries of this cross-class and inter-"racial" liaison — from
premarital to marital and finally to postmarital — Amado weaves the nar-
ration of the changing sexual and gender mores of Ilheus as it gradually
undergoes the transition (previously portrayed in Terras do sem fim and
Sao Jorge de Ilheus) from coronelismo to modern commercial capitalism.
The novel ends with the landmark legal conviction of one of the local ca-
cao "colonels" for the murder of his adulterous wife — the first time in lo-
cal memory that such a conviction has been obtained. But the story Amado
had previously told through epic means, in which a series of personal des-
tinies is presented in such a way that their determination by historical and
economic factors is made tangible and concrete, becomes, in Gabriela, a
kind of domestic idyll, or, to adopt Doris Sommer's term in Foundational
Fictions, a "romance."15 No longer depicted as necessary, if likewise tragic
and contradictory in its outcome, the transition to modern capitalist de-
pendency, symbolized by the fall of the colonels and the rise of the port-
based trading houses, becomes, in Gabriela, a subject for farce. Politics re-
cede into the background, to be replaced in the foreground by the theme
that is to characterize Amado's fiction from 1958 on: the exotic, eroticized
piquancy of Bahia's Afro-Brazilian culture, most often as epitomized in
women, music, and food.
With Gabriela, Amado achieves almost instantaneous acceptance by the
Brazilian bourgeois literary establishment. His past sins, above all his or-
thodox socialist realist or "Zhdanovite" phase, are forgiven, and he is wel-
comed into the literary circles and salons that had for years excluded him.
The record here is dramatic indeed. Up until 1959, Amado, despite be-
coming both nationally and internationally famous, had received only two
literary prizes: the Premio Graca Aranha in 1936 and the Stalin Prize in
1951. In 1959 alone he receives for Gabriela four major awards, with more
to follow in 1961. And, most dramatic of all, in April of 1961 he is unani-
mously elected to a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters — a seat for
which, in a historical first, he is the sole and uncontested candidate. Sales

of Gabriela are unprecedented for a Brazilian work of fiction. Critics, from
the Catholic conservative Tristao de Athayde to the existentialist Jean-Paul
Sartre hail the Party "dissident" Amado as a literary genius. And, as Wag-
ner observes, those who rush to valorize Amado's new departure invariably
discover in Gabriela a wealth of "advances" in literary form and technique
(246). Only a few old communist stalwarts object to the political apology
clearly being enacted in Amado's new novel.16 Even high-level Brazilian
politicians, including presidents Juscelino Kubitschek and Janio Quadros,
eager as they are to plug into Amado's mass readership, declare themselves
fans of Gabriela.
Do we not thus have in Gabriela what may virtually be the first "boom"
novel? Many of the requisite characteristics seem to be there: the self-con-
sciously "literary" concern for new formal techniques, the mass sales, the
conversion of the author into a national celebrity. It must be admitted that
Gabriela, despite its retreat from Amado's earlier epic and politically im-
passioned mode of narration, is still a work concerned with the historical
portrayal of Brazilian society at a decisive phase. Amado the realist remains

very much present in this work despite the new tone of preciosity and far-
cical remove from history as "grand recit." The obsession with purely for-
mal experiments and "language" has not reached (nor will it in Amado's
subsequent work) anything like the extreme of, say, Garcia Marquez's El
otono del patriarca. There is no Joycean or Faulknerian imprint here. It
would perhaps even require some imagination to characterize Gabriela as
a work of "modernism" in the full sense of the term. But there can be, to
my mind, no doubt about the novel's distinctively Cold War modernist
subtext: above all, the careful retreat from the objectives of social or social-
ist realism and the avoidance of any open signs of political engagement.
Needless to say, Gabriela will not satisfy the revolutionary-historicist the-
ory of the "boom" novel by sheer virtue of chronology. Amado was certainly
to become a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, but in the years 1956-58
the crucial historical experience for Amado is clearly the Cold War itself and
its political impact on the very considerable left-led mass movement in
Brazil. But perhaps this suggests a closer link between the canonical "boom"
novel and the Cold War than is typically thought to exist. Certainly none
of the standard "boom" authors duplicate Amado's history of intense po-
litical activity. Nor do they, like Amado, emerge into modernism out of a
prior tradition of historical and social realism. The new political and ideo-
logical reality that in 1956 rushes upon an author such as Amado, with
catastrophic effect, becomes, tor the somewhat younger and more politi-
cally disengaged figure of a Fuentes or Cortazar, something more in the
nature of a horizon of ideologically unquestioned assumptions. The bud-
ding "boom" novelist is more likely an existentialist—via readings of Sartre
and Camus — than a militant Leninist. But if the Cuban Revolution results
in a sudden, seemingly left-wing inflection within the generally rightward
evolution, then its effect, it seems to me, is largely superficial and tempo-
rary. As Halperin justly notes, it seems not to have induced the new phase
of historical realism that might have been expected if the ideological im-
pact of Cuba were really as profound as is sometimes claimed. What Cuba
elicits from the "boom" is, I would argue, a somewhat more militant ver-
sion of a Latin American nationalism that just as easily supports a Peron
or an Omar Torrijos as it does a Fidel.
The value of rereading the "boom" through a technically postcanonical
novelist such as Amado is, at the very least, that it gives us a clearer pic-
ture of what was politically at stake in the generation of a literary moment
about which there has grown the myth that it was both inevitable and the
expression of a Latin American essence. By looking at Gabriela as a virtual

"boom" text—but also within the context of the Amadian historical real-
ism with which it breaks — the myth of essence, or what we have also
termed the myth of modernism itself as consubstantial with a raw, pre-
political level of contemporary experience, is more easily shattered. And
shattering this myth remains, in my view, a vital task. For if, as we are told,
the Cold War is over, its ideological and cultural legacy is still very much
with us.
1992

Larsen. The Boom Novel and Cold War in Latin America

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Larsen. The Boom Novel and Cold War in Latin America

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CHAPTER FIVE

The "Boom" Novel and the Cold

Although one can still encounter serious efforts to produce a theory of

the Cold War divide to promote the canonization of modernist works —

monly alleged theory may be termed the aesthetidst. Typically advanced by

nomena such as market trends, demographic shifts, and changing consump-

terminant of the "boom" novel has always seemed somewhat dubious to

lucid essay "Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas en la

But, continues, Halperin, alluding to the violent military repression of the

"political apoliticism" and, at least at first, openly encourages an image of

els as otherwise diverse as Cambaceres's En la sangre, for instance, and Re-

But is the literary breakthrough into a modern historical realism in fact an

antimodernist, school of rural proletarian realism, are what ultimately

literary and political career but in Cold War historiography as well.

demning the "cult of personality." Although he remains a party member,

which, in a historical first, he is the sole and uncontested candidate. Sales

portrayal of Brazilian society at a decisive phase. Amado the realist remains

expression of a Latin American essence. By looking at Gabriela as a virtual

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