Spanish American Novel: Key Trends and Major Authors

1. Novelistic Trends and Important Stages

Novelistic trends in the first decades of the 20th century:

• The gaucho novel: set in the Argentine pampas, idealizing the gaucho's way of life. Second Shadow by Ricardo Güiraldes is a key example.
• The Mexican Revolution novel: Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela.
• The novel of the land: depicts the wild American nature and barbarism. Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos stages the conflict between civilization and barbarism.
• The indigenist novel: arises in the Andean region, protesting the treatment of indigenous peoples. Notable works include Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo and Ciro Alegría's El mundo es ancho y ajeno.

2. The Magical Realism Boom

Around 1930 the structuralist novel, the new narrative and the consolidation of the 1960s emerged. Hombres de maíz by Miguel Ángel Asturias and El reino de este mundo by Alejo Carpentier are landmark texts.

2.1. Characteristics

• The search for identity: symbolism is used, often through a journey (physical, mental or spiritual) undertaken to find an answer.
• The dictator: the figure of the dictator is a recurring theme in Spanish American history.
• Nature: the invincible force of nature always imposes its laws on the human being.
• Urban life: authors also begin to address the urban setting.
• Literature about literature: narrators show their concern for the creation of literature and offer opinions about what the novel should be.
• Reality and fantasy: the dichotomy between the Western rational and the irrational disappears; myths, legends and the marvelous are incorporated as part of everyday life. Magical realism permeates the narrative.
• Fantastic literature: authors often blend reality with the fantastic, highlighting the strife that engulfs the everyday or the fantastic world.

2.2. Technical Narratives

• The narrator: the omniscient narrator gives way to a narrator who is a protagonist, character or witness, producing a multiplicity of perspectives.
• Time: linear time is broken; authors use resources such as temporal inversion, and the stories overlap.
• The language: great concern for the syntactic elaboration of prose, its rhythm, its images, and the Baroque tendency, which gives the novel a rich linguistic elaboration.

2.3. Key Authors

Miguel Ángel Asturias: his first work, Leyendas de Guatemala, shows a certain symbiosis between the Indian and Mayan worlds, drawing on the Popol Vuh. His novel El señor presidente is an important denunciation of the dictatorship of the Latin American historical past. Thematically, the work denounces the merciless dictatorship; technically, it displays structural novelties. Hombres de maíz is also a key text.

Alejo Carpentier: characterized by intellectual elaboration and linguistic richness. His stories present individual experiences: subjectivity, memory, time and history shape other principal motifs. His first novel, Ecue-Yamba-Ó, looks back to the spiritual roots of Cuba. El reino de este mundo is set in Haiti, where Carpentier came into contact with "what is marvelous and real". The spiritual contact with nature is central, and the time technique is recurrent.

Juan Rulfo: El llano en llamas is a collection of 15 rural stories. Pedro Páramo represents the revolution in narrative structure, using a fragmented structure in which narrative planes overlap. Thematically, the work incorporates Mexican aspects such as beliefs about death and popular traditions; the setting serves to show the desolation and hopelessness of the people. The story follows Pedro Páramo, already dead, as he recalls his life while seeking his beloved son Juan.

Jorge Luis Borges: poet, narrator and essayist endowed with great creative qualities and a solid classical culture. He is considered one of the greatest writers of Spanish American letters. He stands out as a fantastic narrator. The enigmatic labyrinth, whose solution aims at the projection of multiple perspectives, is central. Name, destiny, time, dreams and eternal return are themes that run through his whole work. Notable titles include Ficciones, El Aleph, El hacedor, Otras inquisiciones and El libro de arena.

2.4. Other Authors

Arturo Uslar Pietri: renovated the novel with historical themes in Las lanzas coloradas, which is impressionist in style and shows symbolic notes.

Agustín Yáñez: new in its focus on the theme of the Mexican Revolution in Al filo del agua.

José María Arguedas: the novel acquires a clearly lyrical tone in Los ríos profundos.

3. The Spanish American Novel Boom

In 1962 La ciudad y los perros by Mario Vargas Llosa was published. In 1967 Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez appeared. Novels by other authors such as Cortázar, Sábato, Carlos Fuentes and others also appeared. For Spanish readers, the Spanish American novel was a great astonishment at that time, as these works produced the greatest impact.

3.1. Characteristics

The new Spanish American novelists brought to their work a series of innovations that break with previous conventions. The novel adopts new resources, confirms the expansion of themes and, in particular, favors the urban novel. The integration of the fantastic and the real is consolidated. A renovation and accentuation in narrative technique is evident, with an overlap of linguistic registers and styles.