Anything but Novel: Pushing the Margins in Latin American Post-Utopian Historical Narrative

By Jennie Irene Daniels

The first in-depth study in English to analyze post-utopian historical novels written during and in the wake of brutal Latin American dictatorships and authoritarian regimes

During neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, murder, repression, and exile had reduced the number of intellectuals and Leftists, and many succumbed to or were coopted by market forces and ideologies. The opposition to the economic violence of neoliberal projects lacked a united front, and feasible alternatives to the contemporary order no longer seemed to exist. In this context, some Latin American literary intellectuals penned post-utopian historical novels as a means to reconstruct memory of significant moments in national history. Through the distortion and superimposition of distinct genres within the narratives, authors of post-utopian historical novels incorporated literary, cultural, and political traditions to expose contemporary challenges that were rooted in unresolved past conflicts.

In Anything but Novel, Jennie Irene Daniels closely examines four post-utopian novels—César Aira’s Ema, la cautiva, Rubem Fonseca’s O Selvagem da Ópera, José Miguel Varas’s El correo de Bagdad, and Santiago Páez’s Crónicas del Breve Reino—to make their contributions more accessible and to synthesize and highlight the literary and social interventions they make. Although the countries the novels focus on (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador) differ widely in politics, regime changes, historical precedents, geography, and demographics, the development of a shared subgenre among the literary elite suggests a common experience and interpretation of contemporary events across Latin America. These novels complement one another, extending shared themes and critiques.

Daniels argues the novels demonstrate that alternatives exist to neoliberalism even in times when it appears there are none. Another contribution of these novels is their repositioning of the Latin American literary intellectuals who have advocated for the marginalized in their societies. Their work has opened new avenues and developed previous lines of research in feminist, queer, and ethnic studies and for nonwhite, nonmale writers.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Nov 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9780817394714

Book preview

Anything but Novel

Anything but Novel

PUSHING THE MARGINS IN LATIN AMERICAN POST-UTOPIAN HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

Jennie Irene Daniels

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Arno Pro

Cover image: Rainbow over glacier, El Calafate, Argentina; photo by Kevin M. Talbert

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2173-4 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-8173-6107-5 (paper)

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9471-4

FOR KEVIN, AND FOR AMOS

In an unsatisfactory reality, in a present laden with pressing needs that hopes to shake up the déjà vu of inequality, injustice, and oppression, one cannot speak of the ennui or of the paralysis of history because its rereading is an indispensable point of departure for the evaluation of the present and the formulation of new projects. What is necessary is the revision of this history, of its discourse, and of its strategies.

—MAGDALENA PERKOWSKA, Historias híbridas

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. From Liberalism to Neoliberalism: Pathos and Indifference in César Aira’s Ema, la cautiva

2. Playing with Genre: Dissonant Harmonies of Past and Present in Rubem Fonseca’s O Selvagem da Ópera

3. Art and Activism in José Miguel Varas’s El correo de Bagdad: The Significance of the Novel in the Neoliberal Age

4. To Boldly Go: Capitalism’s Crises Past, Present, and Future in Santiago Páez’s Crónicas del Breve Reino

Afterword

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the assistance of many individuals and organizations. First, I am indebted to The College of Idaho’s generous sabbatical program and to those people who made my 2019–2020 research leave possible: Presidents Doug Brigham and Jim Everett, Provost David Douglass, the Board of Trustees, and the Faculty Growth and Development Committee. I am grateful to my current and former colleagues in the World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department, especially Kevin Coryell and Séverine Orban, for helping me to make the most of this opportunity. Associate Deans Mee-Ae Kim and Andrew Gades were also indispensable in their support for the Department in my absence.

In addition, I am grateful to have received funding and support from several institutions. From within The College of Idaho, the Faculty Growth and Development Committee and the National Endowment for the Humanities Steering Committee awarded research and travel funding at various points throughout this process. Additionally, a research fellowship with the Idaho Humanities Council allowed me to spend time working on this project in Argentina. Finally, the Wesleyan Center at Point Loma Nazarene University welcomed me as a 2019 Visiting Summer Scholar, providing a refreshing change of scenery in which to work. Thank you in particular to Sam Powell and Mark Maddix for your administration of this program and assistance on site.

Many thanks to those who contributed valuable insight over the course of this project: Misha Kokotovic, Luis Martín-Cabrera, Éster Gimbernat González, Jacqueline Mitchell, Kevin Talbert, John Burns, Rochelle Johnson, David Douglass, Mee-Ae Kim, and Kathy Seibold. My editor at the University of Alabama Press, Wendi Schnaufer, has been a pleasure to work with; I am truly grateful for her excellent guidance throughout the process.

Chapter 3 of this book is based on my article "Resistance as a Transnational Construct: The Intellectual and Marginalization in Varas’s El correo de Bagdad," published in Confluencia: Revista hispánica de cultura y literatura 31, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 28–41. The anonymous reviewers for the article and for the book gave helpful, thoughtful feedback that has greatly influenced both texts’ overall organization and content.

The staff and collections of several institutions also deserve special thanks. The librarians and staff of The College of Idaho’s Cruzen-Murray Library are absolutely stellar. Dayle Winbigler, Lance McGrath, and Christine Schutz, your help searching for texts, curating of the home library collections, and general guidance have been invaluable. Additionally, as I conducted research on site in Argentina the personnel and resources of many institutions were most helpful, including at the Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, the Archivo General de la Nación, the Biblioteca del Congreso de la Nación and its newspaper and periodicals archive, the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia, the Museo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires Cornelio de Saavedra, the Museo Histórico Nacional, and the Museo Etnográfico Juan B. Ambrosetti. Julio Esteban Vezub, Pilar Pérez, and José María Brindisi also offered valuable contributions, and programming at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires was both enjoyable and illuminating.

Finally, and mostly importantly, Kevin Talbert. You are always the very best listener, reader, sounding board, and companion. And Amos, for impeccable timing, for taking just the right number of naps, and for the reminder that you are of the joy and trepidation of hopeful anticipation, I am thankful.

Introduction

It has been more than twenty years since the emergence of Latin America’s pink tide. Significant social and political changes have occurred, but neoliberal capitalism has deepened regionally and globally in the intervening years. From within this context, past and present, I have written Anything but Novel. This book uncovers anew the enduring social potential of literary narrative, and particularly the tenacious insistence on sociohistorical criticism that Latin American post-utopian historical novels assert. I explore the evolution of historical novels and intellectual engagement in the region as well as the legacy of struggles for utopian ideals, and I examine a subset of four examples: César Aira’s Ema, la cautiva (1978/1981, Argentina), Rubem Fonseca’s O Selvagem da Ópera (1994, Brazil), José Miguel Varas’s El correo de Bagdad (1994, Chile), and Santiago Páez’s Crónicas del Breve Reino (2006, Ecuador). These novels lay bare the underlying assumptions of accepted versions of history that reinforce the hegemony of capitalist modernization as a positive developmental force, revealing instead how, since the foundational years of the nation, economic structures have reinforced and exacerbated existing inequalities, resulting in racism and sexism that limit life possibilities. As context, I provide a brief overview of recent political events in these countries here.

While some speak of a Left-Right pendulum in Latin American politics, since the region’s transitions to democracy, most swings toward the Left have been arrested in the Center. As sluggish economies, inflation, persistent extreme inequality, and government policies further squeezed the disadvantaged, the austral spring of 2019 witnessed new skirmishes. Social responses with varying levels of coordination have won concessions and reversals of policies that disproportionately affected the poor and lower classes. Yet, the policies themselves and initial government reactions to demonstrations reveal how deeply ingrained neoliberal capitalism has become: when financial and ecological pressures reached a breaking point, people demanded redress, but amends thus far have only addressed the most recent, visible issues and left underlying processes and projects untouched. Under pink tide and leftist administrations, Latin America has benefited from an ameliorated capitalism, but capitalism nonetheless.

In Argentina and Brazil, citizens have been scrutinizing and putting pressure on their right-wing, pro-free-market presidents. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022), a nationalist espousing neoliberal policies, is a polarizing figure who has defended the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–85) and its use of torture. Many claim his environmental deregulation and reduction of protections for indigenous groups have encouraged greater slash-and-burn clearing in the Amazon, which, in dry weather, often results in fires getting out of control. In early August 2019, after the National Institute for Space Research released a report about the alarming reduction in the Amazon’s size, Bolsonaro fired its director-general, claimed media reports of raging fires in the Amazon were fake, and then blamed environmental groups for starting the fires, sparking local and international outrage and protests. He later deployed military forces to control the fires. In spite of local and international pressure, at the time this book went to press, fires continued to burn at alarming rates, damaging, perhaps irreparably, the health of these lungs of the world.

During this same period, on October 27, 2019, for the first time in Argentine history, voters rejected the incumbent president’s bid for a second term. President Mauricio Macri’s (2015–19) coalition, Together for Change,¹ garnered less than one-third of votes. His changes, among other things, had reversed regulations by former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–15), reopening the Argentine economy to International Monetary Fund (IMF) debt and conditions. After years of growing inflation under Macri, Fernández de Kirchner returned to the presidential seat, the Casa Rosada, amid corruption allegations as vice president to President Alberto Fernández (no relation). On May 22, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, Argentina defaulted on its sovereign debt for the third time this century. Even as the new economy minister, Silvina Batakis, took over on Martín Guzmán’s sudden resignation in July 2022 and promised to meet IMF obligations by slashing energy subsidies and balancing accounts, inflation spiraled, and bonds and the peso plummeted.

Meanwhile, in 2019 in Ecuador and Chile, demonstrators took to the streets, prompting state of emergency declarations and military crackdowns. Two days after Ecuadorian president Lenín Moreno (2017–21) announced a new credit agreement with the IMF that would include significant decreases in fuel subsidies, protesters flooded the streets. From October 3 to 13, 2019, workers, students, and indigenous people blocked roads, took over buildings, and held demonstrations, backed by the Unitary Workers’ Front,² the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE),³ the Federation of University Students of Ecuador,⁴ and other organizations. After negotiations between Moreno and CONAIE leaders, the administration withdrew its agreement with the IMF; demonstrators also withdrew, many cleaning up as they went,⁵ and Moreno’s government returned from its temporary administrative seat in Guayaquil. Still, as the root causes persist, so do Ecuador’s demonstrations. Early 2022 saw widespread protests, and CONAIE, other indigenous organizations, and their allies have returned to the streets during the boreal summer, claiming that their demonstrations will be ongoing.

In Chile, demonstrators held months-long protests after their initial rejection of a public transit rate increase gave way to dissatisfaction with privatization, inequality, and high costs of living. Protests erupted on October 7, 2019, with secondary students staging a coordinated campaign to evade subway fares. Demonstrations quickly grew in size, with most participants demanding change from the streets and through the media, though some burned buildings and damaged metro stations. President Sebastián Piñera (2010–14, 2018–22) responded with violent state repression, invoking polarizing public safety language reminiscent of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–90). Piñera attempted unsuccessfully to quell demonstrations by reversing the fare increase and dismissing several members of his cabinet, but protests continued largely unabated until the COVID-19 pandemic led to large-scale lockdowns in fall 2020. As a result, an elected constituent assembly, which included representation from indigenous communities that was roughly proportional to the national population, drafted a new constitution to replace the one created by Pinochet’s regime. This draft, progressive in the areas of social rights, sexual and reproductive rights, and environmental considerations, among other things, was submitted to a national plebiscite on September 4, 2022. A majority of voters rejected the draft, leaving in effect the constitution created by Pinochet’s regime.

The specter of earlier dictatorships in Ecuador and Chile haunted public discourse, even as demonstrators and military forces faced off in the streets. The effects of neoliberal economic restructuring by Chile’s military regime and 1990s administrations persist decades later. Demonstrators from both countries named neoliberal policies in particular as a primary source of their complaints, denouncing austerity measures that disproportionately affect people who have little left to give. Untenable economic inequality, price increases, and widely perceived lack of institutional representation have exposed the challenges of organizing society through a structure that protects and rewards the wealthiest, those who control the means of production, with the consolidated surplus produced by the labor of the less privileged. Chile’s plebiscite on the newly drafted constitution is significant for the current neoliberal order: the new draft challenged long-standing and more recent economic norms. It also offered alternatives, some specific and others vague, and many fairly expensive. However, the process and end result revealed significant social tensions lying barely below the surface.

The current moment recalls earlier times in the recent past. Jorge Castañeda’s opening lines of Utopia Unarmed (1993) explain the reasons for the continued search for economic alternatives in Latin America: the left remains relevant in Latin America because the end of the Cold War and the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have not brought an end to the original causes that gave it birth. If anything, those causes today are more real, more compelling, than ever: poverty, injustice, gaping social disparities, and overwhelming daily violence.⁶ Nonetheless, as brutal dictatorships gave way to democratic transitions in the 1980s and neoliberal economic policy became widespread and hegemonic during the 1990s, the intellectual field shifted and the Left seemed in collapse. Cultural icons of the Left, including Castañeda himself, succumbed as revolutionary projects seemed unviable. Similarly to today, not only did the opposition to the economic violence of neoliberal projects often lack a united front but feasible alternatives to the contemporary order no longer seemed to exist.

With the knowledge of our contemporary context, throughout this book I explore literary responses to that earlier disillusionment. The title of this book may serve as a heuristic for my reader, playing on key concepts that I explore and build on first in this introduction, and then throughout each of the four chapters. Anything but Novel: Pushing the Margins in Latin American Post-Utopian Historical Narrative recognizes the post-utopian historical novel both as prose fiction in the genre of novel and as a form of narrative that is very unlike the standard form of a novel. Through the distortion and superimposition of distinct genres within post-utopian historical narrative, the authors hail literary, cultural, and political traditions to expose contemporary challenges as both a product of current events and as rooted in unresolved past conflicts. The phrase Anything but Novel also plays on the idea of new. Historical processes revisited or continuing in the present, historical novel as a commonly used mode of writing in the mid-twentieth century and surfacing again during the democratic transition, and literary experimentation (though with commonly used forms) as a way to disrupt established historical narratives and express social changes underway are all both old and new. As elsewhere, Latin America’s diverse peoples are a living product of historical relationships, which these novels represent as the outgrowth of multifaceted processes and tensions present in the founding years of their nations. These representations, placed in dialogue with one another, trace the complexities of contemporary societal concerns to historical antecedents; however, rather than asserting a simple causal sequence, they disrupt the authority of historical narratives while simultaneously establishing the necessity of historical reference to address present-day concerns. Genre mixture and distortion produces texts that defy levels of reality: while many post-utopian historical novels reconsider leftist revolutionary movements and their failures, my study focuses on a subgroup that represents contemporary structural problems as built into the very foundation of the nation. Castañeda’s causes of leftist national liberation projects, according to these texts, are actually symptoms of capitalist processes still at work in Latin American societies today.

At the same time as socially committed writers challenge gender, ethnic, and sexual inequalities, and their intersections, this book challenges the disillusioned to reengage in struggles for equality. In our current moment of rising hard right extremism in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, the writers’ message is also pertinent: the past is relevant in the resolution of contemporary social issues, but to be able to improve existing inequalities, we must first be able to envision, at least in part, alternative solutions. As I explore the ways these texts manipulate and play with literary genre in their examination of past and present, I highlight the creativity of post-utopian historical novels and particularly their ability to imagine the possibility of alternative narratives in the continuing struggle for greater social equality and inclusion.

The writers of the post-utopian historical novels I examine in this book were born into the legacy of Latin America’s lettered city and respond both to national and international cultural trends and to their intellectual traditions. Some post-utopian historical novels directly address earlier literary works. For example, Aira’s Ema, la cautiva rewrites Esteban Echeverría’s La cautiva (Argentina, 1837) as travel narrative and reconsiders the origins of capitalism through a poor, Brown, delinquent, sexually liberated protagonist. Others revisit historical or fictional cultural icons. Rubem Fonseca claims his novel, O Selvagem da Ópera, is the foundation for a film script. He examines racism in Brazil through a representation of Brazil’s elite classes during the abolition era in this fictionalized biography of mulato opera composer Antônio Carlos Gomes (1836–1896). José Miguel Varas’s El correo de Bagdad explores the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile by following a contemporary fictional journalist’s discovery of a Mapuche artist living in Baghdad during the 1960s. The novel is the journalist’s manuscript, which contains the artist’s letters to his uncle-in-law. Santiago Páez, like still other novelists, fictionalizes historical events in his Crónicas del Breve Reino without relying on a single protagonist. As its title suggests, his novel takes the form of four related stories. I focus on these four novels from four different countries as case studies of the subgenre.

While there are many excellent post-utopian historical novels that engage with history and capitalism through genre play, these four allow for a discussion of various aspects of the trend in this subgenre complementarily, while avoiding redundancy. First, they represent a broad cohort of countries: Southern Cone nations (Argentina and Chile), Brazil, and the Andean region (Ecuador). While I acknowledge vast differences in politics, regime changes, historical precedents, geography, and population demographics, the development of a shared subgenre suggests a shared experience and interpretation of contemporary events across Latin America among the literary intelligentsia. Second, these novels foreground the deleterious effects of capitalism during their country’s respective period of national consolidation (i.e., the decades immediately following independence from the colonizing country), while representing contemporary subjective responses to the same. Finally, the four novels employ a variety of overlapping genres and complement one another, extending shared themes and critiques.

Certain Latin American literary intellectuals used this genre play in the new subgenre of post-utopian historical novels as a means to reconstruct memory of significant moments in national history in order to revalue leftist intellectualism and to promote the welfare of their societies’ most vulnerable populations. They push the margins both in the sense of promoting (but not speaking for) marginalized voices, and in the sense of expanding social limits of inclusion, as I will discuss. Historical fiction was a dominant genre at the end of the twentieth century, and in this study, I consider the trajectory of historical narrative and the significance of the label post-utopian. Written as lengthy, complex narratives that elicit active readership, the collection I study challenges the notion of a static present in this neoliberal end of history by stimulating a renewed imagining of possible alternatives.

None of the novels advocates for renewed commitment to utopian or communist teleologies. Even Varas’s El correo de Bagdad, with its final question to the reader, only suggests there may be other alternatives to the present order and calls for the reader’s reengagement with social struggles. Still, in the midst of their end-of-history, the authors reclaim alternative histories of the past for the post-utopian present. Perhaps this is one of the greatest lessons they have to offer: a new utopia, in their (and our) present, would consist of the practice of reengagement with the structural (i.e., economic) foundations of the nation, and especially on the part of the lettered city and literary intellectuals. The novels demonstrate that alternatives exist even in times when it appears there are none. Uncovering the underlying assumptions, necessities, and corruption of neoliberal capitalism and imagining other possible ways in which society and the economy could be structured is the greatest threat to its hegemony. In part, this is why so many proponents of capitalism, especially on the Right, work so hard to defund the arts and humanities where at best, much of this critical work takes place, and where at least we are reminded of the human experience in complex societies. And, in part, this is why many of those same people disparage, denigrate, and vilify the media, which can expose corruption. Hegemonic discourse from Center-Left to the far Right argues utopia is imperfect and the capitalist present is the best there is, and therefore we must work within the given framework. But this subset of post-utopian historical novels challenges those who self-identify with the oppositional ethos of the twentieth-century Latin American Left to reclaim their place in aiding movements for economic equality and the benefits it may help to engender in other social arenas.

A second major contribution of these novels is their repositioning of the Latin American literary intellectual. Despite the fragmentation of the Left, many writers from a variety of backgrounds have advocated for the marginalized in their societies. Their work has opened new avenues and developed previous lines of research in feminist, queer, and ethnic studies, and nonwhite non-male writers and scholars have greater access to formal channels of power (via publishing, public speaking, and professional roles) than ever before in the history of Latin America. The post-utopian historical novels I analyze in this book suggest the need for the literary intelligentsia to reengage the analysis of structural issues, which was often sidelined during the rise of neoliberalism, even as they also highlight intersecting types of marginalization. Literature continues to play an important role in shaping national and international narratives and in providing alternatives to the seemingly inescapable ever-present specter of neoliberalism.

A CRITICAL JUNCTURE: PAST AND PRESENT IN LATIN AMERICAN POST-UTOPIAN HISTORICAL NOVELS

Latin American post-utopian historical novels productively intersect the tension between history and fiction, post-utopian literature, and literary trends of the late twentieth century. Like the grand narratives of the mid-twentieth-century literary boom, post-utopian historical novels reject history as fixed and knowable, encouraging a historiographical consciousness in their readers.⁷