THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR IN

LATIN AMERICA

nrfr
Neil Larsen

One of the collateral if perhaps somewhat fortuitous benefits of the

current preoccupation with postmodernism in the humanities is that it
has now become much more difficult to sustain what for decades was
the dominant mode of apology for modernism itself, and the underlying
ideology of its "canonicity": the idea that modernwm and modern;^ were
consubstantial categories, that modernum was somehow already precon-
tained in the raw and immediate experience of contemporary life. To de-
fend, 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 laying ideological claim to being the realism of our (or its) time.
Given this fundamental premise, one might or might not concede the ex-
istence of a modernist "politics." But even supposing one did, such a
"politics" tended to be viewed as likewise consubstantial with "modern-
ity" 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.
Although one can still find serious efforts to attribute to modernism
both a lived immediacy and a kind of teleological necessity (see, for ex-
ample, Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts into Air), this sort of think-
ing must now confront the sense among intellectuals and cultural con-
sumers generally that modernism has failed to keep its Utopian promises
and that contemporary experience may not after all be of a piece with

Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 3, Autumn 1992. Copyright by Purdue Research Founda-
tion. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

771
modernist aesthetics. For some, no doubt, the same premise of consubstan-
tiality now restates itself, mutatis mutandis, as the relationship of postmoder-
nism to postmodernity. But modernist burn-out 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 per-
tinence 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 un-
suspected in canonically modernist aesthetic categories and practices. In
any event, the relation of modernism to both modern experience and to
other aesthetic 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
Lukcs of the early 1950s [see, inter alia, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism
and the epilogue to The Destruction of Reason]). But theas one might put
itone-two punch of Cold War thinking itself, together with the general-
ly promodernist stance of the New Left, had until recently kept this ques-
tion outside the limits of acceptable discourse.) Serge Guilbaut, in his
1983 How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, argues, for example, that
the rise of Abstract Expression in the U.S. 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 decanonize the old Popular Front realism of the 1930s and replace it
with a depoliticized art compatible with the U.S. imperial elite's new im-
age of itself as the guardian of aesthetic culture. A similarly political con-
nection is uncovered in Lawrence H. Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputa-
tion. Here Schwartz analyzes the shift in Faulkner's literary fortunes from
relative obscurity in the 1930s and early 1940s to the super stardom of
the 1950s and after as a function of the same Cold War cultural cam-
paign to delegitimize the Left-leaning social and proletarian realism that
thrived in the pre-Cold War United States through the creation of a new,
distinctly "apolitical" and purportedly authentic "American" novelist.
Guilbaut and Schwartz emphasize 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 pro-
letarian fiction of the 1930s stems directly from an institutionalization of
the politically aggressive promodernism of the New York intellectuals. And
one should note here as well Barbara Foley's important new reading of
the North American proletarian novel itself, in which she has shown that
the initial reception of works by authors such as Erskine Caldwell,
772 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
Josephine Herbst, Mike Gold, Richard Wright, and others, not only by
Left-wing but by more "mainstream" critics as well, was generally en-
thusiastic. If this major body of literature, stigmatized for its supposed
aesthetic crudity and propagandism, later languished in the shadow of
modernists such as Faulkner, this, she shows, was at least as much a
result of the Cold War cooptation 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 is an anti-Communist plot, but rather
the tendency of 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 and/or had no direct relationship to the
aggressively anti-Communist 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
scrupulously maintained neutrality as purely self-referential languages of
form, or what Guilbaut calls their "political apoliticism" (2). The politics
of the Cold War do not create modernism. To suppose so would be to
fall into an obvious 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, in-
cluding my own, the creed of a modernist consubstantiality with contem-
porary lifeof modernism, 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 demands of the Cold War, above all the elevation of anti-Com-
munism into a virtual touchstone not only for political but for virtually
all cultural practice as well, and the canonization of Latin American moder-
nism, especially modernist narrative?
Initially, however, some clarification is required. "Modernism" is
in some ways an unaccustomed term in the sphere of Latin American
literary discourse. Its Spanish cognatemodernismorefers to a literary
movement appearing in Spanish America at roughly the turn of the cen-
tury, mainly in poetry, and with affinities for French symbolism and Par-
nassianism. By any account, however, modernismo would have to be deemed
a pre- or at best proto-modernist 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 moder-
nism directly assimilable to some metropolitan, or would-be global moder-
nist 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 assimilation does considerable violence to a modern Latin American

LARSEN 773
body of literature that, while not quite outside the orbit of canonical moder-
nism, nevertheless turns on its own unique substrate of contemporary,
lived experience. For a time the preferred term became "magical realism,"
in reference to a mode of literary narrative that, while resembling moder-
nism in its penchant for formal experiments, also differed from it by vir-
tue of its purportedly mimetic relationship to a Latin American reality
that was said to exceed traditionally realist modes of representation.1
But with the proviso that its Latin American variant typically lodges
the claim to an autonomy of form within a prior claim to an 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
Guimares Rosa. There can also be little dispute that the so-called
"boom" phase of Latin American fiction that, beginning in the 1960s,
follows on the work of the lattercomprising works by, inter alia, Fuentes,
Cortzar, Vargas Llosa, and Garc-a Mrquezfully merits the moder-
nist designation. Indeed, as Gerald Martin 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 "climax and consummation
of Latin American Modernism ..." (239).
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 internationally, that the pre-"boom" modernists themselves come
to be tacitly regarded as belonging to a uniform literary current. It is
now a standard article of Latin American literary historiography that
without a Borges, no Cortzar, without a Rulfo or Asturias, no Garcia
Mrquez, and so on. From a certain narrowly philological standpoint, this
is certainly a fact. 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
Garc-a Mrquez, thus realizing 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 achieving, vis- -vis its literary prehistory, what the rise of Faulkner,
or of Abstract Expressionism achieve in their respective North American
spheres: the decisive and a priori exclusion from (or marginalization within)
the canon of nonmodernist works and movements.
But does this elevation of modernism to a hegemonic position likewise
obey, even if only indirectly, a Cold War political logic? Here the analogy

1ThC classic argument for "magical realism" is to be found in Alejo Carpentier's

original, 1949 prologue to his novel, El reino de este mundo.
774 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
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 aestheticist. Typically advanced
by the "boom" authors themselves, the aestheticist account of the "boom"
explains it as simply the discovery of a new literary language in which
to express Latin American reality with, for the first time, complete authen-
ticity. Cortzar, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa all made notorious pro-
nouncements to this effect, and there has been no lack of critics to echo
them 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 imma-
nent 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 formal immanence. Moreover, even if one were
inclined to give credence 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, Guimares Rosa, and
others.2
A second theory of the "boom" that has gained some currency holds
that, as the term "boom" itself implies, the "aesthetic" revolution was
really nothing more than a major expansion of Latin American literary
commodities into domestic and international markets. Its best known ad-
vocate 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" (53, my translation), and along with it the appearance
of the author not only as professional but as media-star.
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 plurality, of secondary importance. What mattered was exclusively
the new reading public; the "boom" novel was such by virtue of its ability
to command this new market, to supply it with a set of self-images that,
for whatever reason, met a pre-existing demand. That is, Rama adopts

2Martin points this out in Journeys through the Labyrinth (241).

LARSEN 775
what might be called the vulgar sociological standpoint, according to which
phenomena such as market trends, demographic shifts and changing con-
sumption and work patterns are separated from questions of both politics
and aesthetics.
Finally, there is the theory, which might be designated the revolutionary-
historicist, that sees the "boom" novel as the literary manifestation of the
new political consciousness generated in Latin America by the Cuban
Revolution. The Colombian critic Jaime Mejia-Duque, for example, con-
cedes the significance of both the purely formal and commercial aspects
of the "boom," but regards these as "over-determined" by the new
political reality supposedly inaugurated in 1959 (86). The fact that, par-
ticularly after the Padilla affair of 1971,3 many of the "boom" authors
withdrew their initial support of the revolution demonstrates the "con-
stitutive ambiguity" of the politics of the "boom" but does not negate
the objective historical connection. The "boom" is, in Mejia-Duque's
words, "something exterior to [the] revolution, but not foreign to it" (86,
my translation). More recently Gerald Martin has taken a similar posi-
tion, 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
democratic 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 novelscreated a period
of intense artistic activity throughout the subcontinent. (204-05)
Within this theoretical trend there might also be included those more
negative assessments of the "boom"see for example Fernndez
Retamar's Calibanthat indict the "boom" novelists with being too "ex-
terior" 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, revolutionary-
historicist approach to the "boom" that I think is most adequate. Here,
at least, in contrast to the aestheticist approach, an effort is made to
historicize and politicize modernist 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 determinant 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,

1A bitter controversy surrounding the jailing of poet Heberto Padilla by the Cuban
government for purportedly subversive activities.

776 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

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 revolution to the modernist "revolution" in
literary form (or, if one prefers, the uncontroversially capitalist revolu-
tion in book publishing and marketing) without converting the analogous
term here into the thinnest of abstractions? Such a notion does not answer
but merely begs the questions: what was there particularly "modernist"
in the Cuban Revolution? and/or what particular anti-imperialist or
socialist objectives were furthered through the consecration of modernist
narrative as the authentic mode of contemporary 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 in-
cisive and lucid essay "Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales
hispanoamericanas en la dcada del sesenta" ("The New Narrative and
Spanish American Social Sciences 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 con-
juncture from which it stems . . ." (149, my translation). 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 collec-
tively created through a temporal process whose results are cumulative"
(150, my translation). He attributes this renunciation in part to the fact
that attempts to create a historical novel in Latin America had been pre-
dominantly the work of the pathological-determininist view of history em-
bodied in naturalisma view which, given the political effervescence of
the 1960s, could only seem perversely out of date. But the "boom," in
Halperin's account, answers naturalism not with a deeper historical realism
but rather with an adoption of "new techniques," that is, with moder-
nism. This, in the politically charged atmostphere 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 potencythis
literature is nevertheless recognized as being the most akin to a mass
readership increasingly militant in spirit" (154, my translation). And he
continues:

The readers of Garc-a Mrquez 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 [the reference is to Juan
Pern], 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 savour as delectably traditional in flavor the revolutionary
medicine wisely prescribed for them by Dr. Allende (155, my translation).

LARSEN 777
But, continues, Halperin, alluding to the violent military repression of
the 1970s, "there is no need to be reminded of what bloody horrors were
effectively 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"
(155).
With some extrapolation, the emergent picture here is that of a
modernism that, while remaining, as the Old Left might have put it,
"right" in substance, nevertheless finds itself for a time in the peculiar
historical conjuncture of being "Left" in appearance. Unlike its North
American analog of roughly a decade earlier, this modernism refuses the
mantle of "political apoliticism" and, at least at first, openly encourages
an image of itself as somehow engag. Why? Perhaps because, putting
it bluntly, the Latin American "boom" modernist is an an-yanqui
nationalist before s/he is an anti-Communist. When the populist illusions
of the 1960s are dispelled by the brutal reaction of the 1970s in Latin
American (in fact the death of Che in 1967 can be taken as the symbolic
inauguration of a period of counter-insurgency 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 "testimonial novel"). But Halperin adduces another
factor here as well. This is that, again in contrast to the North American
situation, the modernism of the "boom" does not appear to answer the
elite need to counter-hegemonize a tradition of increasingly Left-tending
realism but rather the outwardly progressive impulse to overcome a much
older tradition of naturalistic portrayal in Latin America. It was in and
through this traditionstretching, conservatively, from Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento's Facundo to the novels of the Mexican revolution and even,
perhaps, into Spanish America's scattered experiments with "socialist
realism" itselfthat the neocolonial intelligentsia 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 novels as otherwise diverse as
Cambaceres' En la sangre, for instance, and Revueltas' El luto humano
the former a frankly reactionary screed, the latter a supposedly progressive,
even revolutionary onethere operates much the same reduction of human
agencies in Latin America to the irresistable working out of a naturally,
even racially or biologically predetermined tragedy. It is against this
background, Halperin argues, that the flight from historical 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 historicismfor which

778 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

he above all thanks the path-breaking work of the Peruvian Marxist Jos
Carlos Mariteguino such breakthrough occurs in literature. If the
"boom" enacts a "revolution," it remains, for Halperin, a "revolucin
Boba"a "fool's revolution," that "solves" the basic difficulty by
resolutely turning its back on it (164).
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 substantively correct insofar as the "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 the grand exception to
the rule herethe 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 sertSes. So,
indeed, does modernism, as witness the examples of a Mario de Andrade,
or what is perhaps the Joycean Ur-text of Latin American modernism,
Guimares Rosa's Grande serto: 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 at-
tributable in turn to a whole series of twentieth-century authors as well,
among them Lima Barreto, Rachel de Quiers, 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
consideration, in light of my original query regarding modernism and
the Cold War, to one of the above authors in particularnamely, to Jorge
Amado. My reasons for this are several. First of all, I would maintain
that Amado's narrative fictions of the 1940s and 50s, specifically from
Terras do sem fim in 1943 until the publication of Gabriela, cravo e canela
in 1958, represent the highest attainment 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 especial-
ly his more orthodox socialist realist novels (Seara vermelha, and the urban
trilogy Os subterrneos da liberdade). These flaws notwithstanding, however,
I think that Amado's work of this period effectively refutes the postulate
of Latin America as condemned to choose between a naturalist,
pathological realism and a modernist 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, here, to suggest that Amado's intense personal involvement
in the class struggles that lead up to the "revolution" of 1930 and subse-
quently ushered in the period of the fascist-inspired "New State" of Getulio
Vargas, together with his strong literary debts to Brazil's "Northeastern,"
and distinctly antimodernist school of rural proletarian realism, are what
LARSEN 779
ultimately make possible the great achievement of a work such as Terras
do sem fim, together with its sequel in the "cacao cycle," So Jorge de
Ilhus: the fully epical portrayal of Brazil's evolution, out of a state of
semifeudal land tenure and rural clientelism (the Brazilian term is corone-
lismo) 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 appears as the "magical" incongruity of life in the traditional,
"backward" sector with the other, increasingly urbanized and hyper-
modern Latin Americaemerges in Amado's fiction as the economically
determined distortions suffered by human beings who do live in thrall,
not to "nature" but to commodities . . . and, in this case, to a single,
export commodity: cacao. Amado is obviously not the first or the last
Latin American novelist to grasp the reality of neocolonial, dependent
capitalism. But he is, I would argue, one of, if not the first to discover
the most effective artistic means for portraying this reality as something
fully historical and dynamicas, in the final analysis, the cumulative pro-
duct of human agencies.
This fact alone makes Amado an interesting foil to the various ver-
sions 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.4 Amado had spent the latter
half of the 1930s in militant opposition to the Vargas dictatorship, an
opposition which resulted in several jailings, exile, and even the public
burning of his works in the capital of his native Bah-a 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
repression sends him into a European exile in 1948, from which he is
not to return until 1952. In 1954 he publishes the militantly socialist realist
trilogy of underground life under Vargas, Os subterrneos 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
"secret" speech denouncing Stalin, delivered at the XXth Party Congress
of the Soviet Communist Party. The speech itself turns out to be a vague,
obviously self-serving harangue in which Krushchev advances the absurd
thesis that all the ills of Soviet society up to present moment are to be
blamed on the individual Stalin and the mystical "cult of personality"

4For much of the information in what follows I rely on Wagner's immensely useful
study, Jorge Amado: Pol-tica e Literatura.
780 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
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 author-
ity of Krushchev 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 anti-Communism. (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
memoirs that the "revelations [in Kruschchev's speech] had broken
Amado's spirit. [. . .] From then on he became quieter, much more sober
in his attitudes and his public statements. I don't believe he had lost his
revolutionary faith, but he concentrated much more on his literary work,
and eliminated from it the directly political aspect that had previously
characterized it" (cited in Wagner 240, my translation). For several months
after the speech, Amado maintains a political silence. Then, in October
of 1956 he publishes a letter in a Brazilian Party newspaper calling for
open discussion of the Krushchev report and condemning the "cult of
personality." Although he remains a Party member, from this point on
Amado begins to withdraw from political life and, as Neruda notes above,
to devote all his energies to his literary career.
The result, published in 1958, is the novel for which he is still prob-
ably best known: Gabriela, cravo e canela. Set, like the earlier "cacao cycle"
in the southern Bahian port of Ilhus, 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 draught-stricken Northeast whom Nacib first hires to
be his cook. Through the vagaries of this cross-class and "inter-racial"
liaisonfrom premarital to marital and finally to postmaritalAmado
weaves the narration of the changing sexual and gender mores of Ilhus
as it gradually undergoes the transition (previously portrayed in Terras
do sem fim and Sao Jorge de Ilhus) from coronelismo to modern commercial
capitalism. The novel ends with the landmark legal conviction of one of
the local cacao "colonels" for the murder of his adulterous wifethe first
time in local memory that such a conviction has been obtained. But the
story Amado had previously told through epic means, in which a series
of personal destinies 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." No longer depicted as necessary
if likewise tragic and contradictory in its outcome, the transition to modern

LARSEN 781
capitalist dependency, symbolized by the fall of the colonels and the rise
of the port-based trading houses, becomes, in Gabriela, a subject for farce.
Politics recede 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 orthodox socialist realist or "Zhdanovite" phase, are forgiven, and
he is welcomed into the literary circles and salons that had for years ex-
cluded him. The record here is dramatic indeed. Up until 1959 Amado,
despite becoming both nationally and internationally famous, had received
only two literary prizes: the Premio Graa 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 unanimously elected to a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Lettersa
seat for which, in a historical first, he is the sole and uncontested can-
didate. Sales of Gabriela are unprecedented for a Brazilian work of fiction.
Critics, from the Catholic conservative Tristo de Athayde to the existen-
tialist Jean-Paul Sartre hail the Party "dissident" Amado as a literary
genius. And, as Wagner observes, those that 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.5
Even high level Brazilian politicans, including presidents Kubitschek and
Quadros, eager 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? The required characteristics seem to be there: the self-
consciously "literary" concern for new formal techniques, the mass sales,
the conversion of the author into a national celebrity, and so on. In all
honesty it must be admitted that Gabriela, despite its retreat from Amado's
earlier epic and politically empassioned 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 farcical remove from history as "grand rcit."

5Wagner cites the criticism of Paulo Dantas, who sees in Gabriela not a process of
"maturation" but rather one of "accommodation," implying a "substantial loss in the most
primitive and authentic qualities of [Amado as] novelist" (248, my translation). Jacob
Gorender, in Wagner's citation, writes that "in Gabriela there disappears the revolutionary
sense of the whole that characterizes Amado's earlier works: the social conflicts are super-
ficial, and the workers come to occupy a very remote and secondary plane" (249, my transla-
tion). Gorender agrees that in Gabriela Amado transcends some of the schematism of Oj
subterrneos da liberdade, but not without paying the price of a political shift to the right.
782 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
The obsession with purely formal experiments and "language" has not
reached (nor will it in Amado's subsequent work) anything like the extreme
of, say, Garc-a Mrquez's Autumn of the Patriarch. There is no Joycean
or Faulknerian imprint here. It would perhaps even require some im-
agination 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 socialist realism and the avoidance
of any open signs of political engagement.
Needless to say, Gabriela will not satisfy the revolutionary-historicist
theory of the "boom" novel by sheer virtue of chronology. Amado was
certainly to become a supporter of the Cuban revolution, but in the years
1956-1958 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 political activity. Nor do they, like Amado, emerge into
modernism out of a prior history of historical and social realism. The
new political and ideological reality that, in 1956, rushes upon an author
such as Amado with catastrophic effect becomes, for the somewhat younger
and more politically disengaged figure of a Fuentes or Cortzar something
more in the nature of a horizon of ideologically unquestioned assump-
tions. The budding "boom" novelist is more likely an Existentialistvia
readings of Sartre and Camusthan a militant Leninist. But if the Cuban
revolution results in a sudden, seemingly Left-wing inflection within the
overall rightward evolution, then its effect, it seems to me, is largely super-
ficial and temporary. As Halperin justly notes, it never induces the new
phase of historical realism that might have been expected if the ideological
impact of Cuba were really as profound as is sometimes claimed. What
Cuba elicits from the "boom" is, I would argue, a somewhat more mili-
tant version of a Latin American nationalism that just as easily supports
a Pern or an Omar Torrijos as it does a Fidel.
The value of rereading the "boom" through a technically extra-
canonical novelist such as Amado is, at the very least, that it gives us
a clearer picture 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" textbut also within the context of the
Amadian historical realism with which it breaksthe myth of essence,
or what we have also termed the myth of modernism itself as consubstan-
tial with a raw, prepolitical 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.
LARSEN 783
 WORKS CITED

Amado, Jorge. Gabriela, cravo e canela. Lisbon: Publicaes Europa-Amrica, 1970.

_____So Jorge de Ilhus. Lisbon: Publicaes Europa-Amrica, 1970.
_____Os subterrneos da liberdade. Lisbon: Publicaes Europa-Amrica, 1976.
_____Terras do sem fim. So Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1942.
Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New
York: Simon, 1982.
Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo. 1949. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barrai, 1967.
Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction,
1929-1941. Unpublished manuscript, 1991.
Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Trans. Arthur
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Halperin Donghi, Tulio. "Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas
en la dcada del sesenta." Vias 147-164.
Luckcs, Georg. The Destruction of Reason. Trans. Peter Palmer. London: Merlin,
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Martin, Gerald. Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth
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Mejia-Duque, Jaime. Narrativa y neocoloniaje en Amrica Latina. Bogot: Ediciones
Tercer Mundo, 1977.
Murphy, James. The Proletarian Moment. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.
Rama, Angel. "El 'boom' en perspectiva." Vias 51-84.
Retamar, Fernndez. Caliban. Montevideo: Aqui Testimonio, .1973.
Schwartz, Lawrence H. Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary
Criticism. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1988.
Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1991.
Vias, David, et. al., eds. Msall del boom: Literatura y mercado. Mexico City: Marcha
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Wagner Berno de Almeida, Alfredo. Jorge Amado: Pol-tica e Literatura. Rio de Janeiro:
Editora Campus, 1979.

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