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"It cannot yet be said that there is a cohesive Latin American
literature, at least in the continental sense. There is, rather,
a continental literature in process, an ongoing development, the
first manifesto of which was perhaps the "Ode" published
in London in 1823 by the Venezuelan Andrés Bello. Latin American
literature is more an intention than a fact simply because Latin
American itself has never achieved cultural integration. A literature
is more than a collection of writers and their works; it is, as
Octavio Paz has pointed out, a coherent system of literary communications,
a critical space in which works mirror each other and participate
in a dialogue with their readers. This space (which exists in Europe
and the United States) is still in the process of being created
in Latin America. Even the name used to identify this part of the
world refers to a geopolitical entity that is actually separated
into two main linguistic and cultural groups: Spanish and Portuguese.
Despite their common peninsular origin, Spanish America and Brazil
have always been separate and apart, since the first days of the
discovery and conquest of the New World. The line that divides the
Spanish from the Portuguese side of South America may not be as
straight today as it was when Pope Alexander VI traced it so imaginatively
in 1493, but it is thicker, and hardened by history. Political independence
from the respective mother countries brought an even more drastic
separation of the new republican regimes of Spanish America from
the empire of Brazil.
Cultural contact between the two blocs remained minimal until quite
recently. It is true that the Mexican Sor Juan Inés de la
Cruz used to read and comment on the sermons of Father Antonio Vieira,
and that the baroque Brazilian satirist Gregorio de Matos knew Góngora's
poetry very well. In general, however, Spanish American and Brazilian
literature progressed in parallel but separate lines of development
until the present century. Even their terminologies differ. What
is called modernism in Spanish America corresponds roughly to Brazilian
parnasianism, while the Brazilian modernism of the 1920s is the
equivalent of the avant-garde movements in Spanish American letters.
In more recent times, there has been more communication between
the two literatures. Neruda's poetry and Borges's fiction have been
widely read in Brazil, while the Mexican Octavio Paz has been in
continuous contact with the Brazilian concrete poets. The new novelists
in Spanish America and Brazil have been familiar with one another's
works in spite of linguistic and publishing barriers. But complete
cultural integration is still a project of the future, and a truly
Latin American literature only a blueprint.
There is not even a Spanish American literature before the nineteenth
century, when independence spurred everywhere the creation of a
culture different from the peninsular and based on more modern (i.e.,
French) models. Political independence did not contribute to integration.
Bolivar and San Martín dreamed of unity while the new nations
quickly separated under local, and weak, governments, each keen
on fostering its own national culture. Some of the best writers
did have a truly continental perspective and fought hard for the
integration of Spanish American literature. But despite their efforts,
it took the best part of fifty years to produce a movement, modernism,
that was authentically Spanish American and that aspired to integrate
what had been written in all parts of the Hispanic world into a
new poetic unity (see Part Three, Introduction).
The paradox is that the integration now being sought did exist
during Colonial times: Spanish American and Brazilian writers were
part of the respective unities called Spanish and Portuguese literature,
and saw themselves essentially as peninsular writers who happened
to be on this side of the Atlantic. In a sense they were right,
although we, looking backward, from our very different perspective,
do not see them as such. In approaching the baroque poets, for instance
(see Introduction to Part One), we recognize in them not successful
disciples of Góngora or Quevedo, but the first Latin American
poets to attempt a new departure in their work. For us, therefore,
they become the founding fathers of Latin American literature. This
perspective is, of course, anachronistic, buy deliberately so. For
the normal diachronic perspective used in literary history I have
substituted a synchronic model in which texts produced in different
times and circumstances are brought together to form a coherent
and unified whole.
In the selection of works produced before 1850, I have leaned heavily
on texts that are more significant perhaps to us than they were
to their contemporary audience. Many prominent figures have been
omitted, either because their importance is purely historical or
simple because they do not travel well in translation. In the selections
of texts that belong to the second half of the nineteenth or to
the twentieth century, I have been generous. More than half of this
anthology is devoted to them because it is in them that the project
of a Latin American literature begins to be fulfilled. I have also
deliberately excluded the Indian literatures, which have contributed
so much to Latin American culture. It was a hard decision to make,
especially because many of the native myths and metaphors have strongly
influenced writers as diverse and as important as the Inca Garcilaso,
the Argentine José Hernández, the Dominican Manuel
de Jesús Galván, the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias,
the Brazilian Mário de Andrade, the Chilean Pablo Neruda,
and the Mexicans Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo. But to show how Indian
literature can be integrated into Latin American letters would require
a larger and different anthology.
This book is generally confined to texts of either fiction or poetry.
No playwrights or essayist are included -the first, because their
works are very difficult if not impossible to excerpt; the second,
because a serious attempt to illustrate their variety and significance
to Latin American letters would require another volume as large
as this one. Only with regard to the Colonial period (Part One)
has a slightly different approach been followed. The best literary
prose of the time is generally not fictional, because the Colonial
authorities did not allow novels to circulate in the New World.
(Many were smuggled in, but that is another story). Colonial writers,
therefore, knowing they had no chance of having a novel published,
abstained from fiction. Nonetheless, fiction thinly disguised as
fact, or fact generously contaminated by fiction, was the stuff
of some of the most exciting chronicles, memoirs, and documents
produced in Colonial times. In truth they do belong to the domain
of fiction, and have been treated as such in this anthology.
A new perspective on Latin American letters has been attempted
in this book: a perspective which presents New World writing as
a permanent quest for a literature of the future, a literary utopia
in which an integrated image of a whole continent will be at long
last possible."
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