The Two-Step Formation Model of Ángel Rama and Antonio Candido: Late Modernism and Aesthetic Autonomy

Introduction

The Brazilian critic Antonio Candido and the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama met in Montevideo in 1960, initiating an important dialogue for Latin American critical theory. This dialogue allowed them to bring together two intellectual and literary experiences—the Brazilian and the Spanish-American—which, despite their different rhythms of development, hold basic elements in common. Furthermore, at a time when the region was struggling for its political, economic and cultural autonomy vis-à-vis imperialist subordination, Rama and Candido’s effort seemed particularly relevant. In the decades that followed their first meeting they engaged in a more programmatic collaboration. As we will argue, in their writings of the period it is possible to identify categories, historical diagnoses and literary choices held in common. This enabled them to map, in a coherent critical perspective, Spanish-American and Brazilian literary works and movements on an expanded Latin American frame. In their essays, they offered a sense of internal orientation in the cultural sphere based on an accumulated intellectual experience and in a sustained collective effort, proper to peripheral nations, that Candido had originally called “formation.” ¹ However, the common project in which both critics engaged since the 1960s was abruptly interrupted in 1983 by the death of Ángel Rama in an airplane crash. According to Candido, the project could not be continued in the same way, with his colleague being one "of the rare unreplaceable men, because without them things will not be done as well as they would do with them." ²

The original idea of writing the present essay jointly, based on shared reflections on Latin American literature of the post-1945 period, was certainly inspired by the lead of this interrupted dialogue between two major figures of peripheral critical theory. But our times are, indeed, very different. In the 1960s, there was a strong impulse toward national and regional autonomy, and, as we shall see, literary critics sought balanced and consistent modernist forms. In recent decades, Latin American criticism has emphasized a global shift to a post-autonomous condition, acutely felt in our region after the shortcomings and failures of so many modernization projects. ³ In our contemporary situation, critics rarely seek literary works based on a strong sense of artistic autonomy. And, in some cases, they have suggested dismissing the autonomy principle altogether. ⁴

In this article, by commenting and reconsidering some key critical concepts and cultural strategies shared by Candido and Rama, we would like to suggest an alternative critical path. We will maintain our focus on what was perhaps the central literary subject of their joint reflection: the so-called Latin American “New Narrative” (nueva narrativa latinoamericana), a movement that thrived during the developmentalist period (1940-1970). Our main task will be to present and reappraise this literary movement from the standpoint of the negative diagnosis of Latin American postwar modernization that has come to prevail from the 1970s onwards. Distancing our position from the current trend to reject in abstract manner emblematic works and basic assumptions of the New Narrative, we will try to advance a critical perspective more sensitive to the complex forms in which it was able to reveal the contradictions and dissonances of its historical material. This perspective could, perhaps, help to reactivate a much-needed contemporary discussion on the critical potential of aesthetic autonomy.

Two-Step Formation: Literary System, Transculturation and Super-Regionalism

The confluence between Candido and Rama’s projects was grounded mainly in the emphasis and defense of a process of national or regional formation capable of driving a complicated dialectic between local and cosmopolitan elements. In his seminal work Formação da Literatura Brasileira (Momentos Decisivos), for instance, Antonio Candido stated he was guided by the goal of “studying the formation of Brazilian literature as a synthesis of universalist and particularistic tendencies” (25). ⁵ However, if the rhythm of the oscillation was considered a threat to the formation of local literature, both Candido and Rama certainly understood that the solution for such a problem was not to abolish any of these tendencies, which constituted what they saw as the evolutionary law of peripheral intellectual life. Instead, the most promising strategy would be to imagine a sufficiently autonomous cultural realm that would be able to guide the double dynamic of Latin American literature and thought.

With regard to this, Candido would suggest the concept of a “literary system” (25) for the first time in 1959, stating that the idea of literary formation required a minimum organization constituted by a “group of literary producers, more or less conscious of its role;” by a “group of readers, constituting the different types of public;” and by a “transmitter mechanism (generally, a language and a set of styles), that links them” (25). ⁶ As Candido would say:

The literary system would function, then, as the first instance (or first step) of the mediation between the particular and the universal, allowing the configuration of a continuity (accumulation or internal causality) where beforehand there were only dualities and oscillating poles. ⁸

Ángel Rama, in turn, seems to have perceived the implications of such a theory, deriving from it a systematic approach, which he extended to other countries in a 1964 text, “Diez problemas para el novelista latinoamericano.” Explicitly relying on Candido, the Uruguayan critic would agree with the thesis that the relative autonomy of Brazilian literature was won at the end of the nineteenth century, though he also pointed out the difficulty of the majority of Spanish America to constitute analogous systems. From his point of view, among Spanish-speaking nations, this had only occurred in Mexico and Argentina by the first decades of the twentieth century, though it would continue gradually on a regional scale.

It should be noted that, in the dialogue between the critics, a relevant line of thought for peripheral criticism began to be constituted. The category of “literary system” provided a firm grounding with which to think about local problems from a complex and objective perspective: neither xenophobic, nor acculturated. Furthermore, it is important to mention, this project received a boost both by the unprecedented surge of industrialization which occurred throughout Latin America between the 1930s and the 1960s, and also by the sense of radical national autonomy, which the 1959 Cuban Revolution had produced throughout the region. In such a context of economic development and social revolution, the assertion of Latin American autonomy seemed to be gaining strength, amid cultural and economic efforts toward regional emancipation.

In this sense, the 1960s and 1970s would also be an important period for Rama and Candido’s intellectual work together. Aiming to map what they considered to be a culminating point in the formation process, both would suggest conceptual novelties with the goal of comprehending the works of writers such as Juan Rulfo, João Guimarães Rosa, Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez and others. Thus, for instance, Rama would reformulate the problem of the mediation of the dialectic between the local and the universal by adapting the theory of “transculturation” ⁹ from Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, whereby a residual culture is submitted, through contact with a dominant culture, to a series of acquisitions and losses (acculturation and deculturation). ^10, In the process, Rama thought, such losses would be redressed by the creation of new elements.

According to this theory, which would become very prominent in Latin American literary theory, the dominant urban pole would impose modernization upon a recessive country pole which, in turn, would try to defensively preserve its own non-modern culture. This left the latter with two equally fatal options: “to retreat and die or to die immediately” (231). ¹¹ That is, the scheme supposed, in the manner of developmentalism, the sudden or gradual erasure of the non-modern pole. In contrast to contemporary developmentalists, however, Rama would reject a unilateral perspective of progress, defending instead the organic incorporation of the non-modern in modernist literary forms.

What matters for our argument is not to go back once more to the (very much debated) topic of literary transculturation in the abstract but rather to understand the keen way by which Rama introduces it as a new phase—specifically related to the developmentalist cycle—in the formation project shared with Candido. Specifically, Rama imagines the formation of a national literary system occurring in the following sequence. At first, in the moment in which the system is constituted, the mediation between cosmopolitism and localism was only possible in very relative terms. As the Uruguayan critic wrote:

Up to this point, we are still in the formation’s first step. Nevertheless, Rama would then point out, transculturational actions contributed to this step’s reinforcement. In this way, the critic seems to suggest that such literary works would serve to continue the mediation that the literary system had already begun in a new level of complexity; that is, evidently, a two-step formation theory. We would like to underline, however, a novelty in this articulation of the formation; namely, the compensatory feature that was ascribed to literary composition. Regarding this, the critic’s words about Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa can be taken as an example: “In the Brazilian linguistic area, the monumental work of Guimarães Rosa represents the improved elaboration of linguistic contributions, transformed into unities of a structure which is meticulously governed by principles of artistic composition” (237). What is lost in the struggle between modernization and local culture is aesthetically recovered here: “If there is a clear surrender of regional languages, there is a simultaneous effort to recover them inside literary speech” (237). Summarizing this second step of the formation, Rama would say: “At this level, the original contribution of transculturators is the linguistic unification of the literary text, in response to principles of artistic unity, but using, in the place of a composed and learned language, its own language” (237). ¹³ This means that, unlike classic regionalism’s naturalistic approach, the transculturators followed the modern principle of internal coherence inherited from literary modernism. ¹⁴

This two-step formation scheme drawn by Rama supposes a distinction, within the historical process, between a first “institutional” or “sociological” moment of cultural autonomy—that is, the consolidation of the literary system at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth—and a later moment, better understood as formal and aesthetic; namely, the conquest of a strict artistic autonomy at the level of the works themselves. It is important to note that this conquest was not won by one author or another but was rather a general aspect of transcultural narrative, and, furthermore, was a conquest of Latin American New Narrative as a modernist movement. This fact, characteristic of the formation’s second, “modernist” moment, would come to enhance through formal immanence the conciliatory project started by the literary system. Such a move would offer a wider margin in which to experiment with artistic solutions, addressing a second modern organicity beyond the developmentalist cycle’s inorganic dualisms.

In the 1970s, the explanatory force of the transcultural model was such that it appeared in a very similar way in the form of Candido’s work on the theory of “super-regionalism” (195). ^15, Just as in Rama’s work, Candido’s scheme supposed a strong dualism which was part of what he called the “lacerated consciousness of underdevelopment” (195). Once more, the mediation of extremes was attributed to the artistic form, whose crafters were the same as the ones mentioned in Rama’s theory of transculturation: mainly Guimarães Rosa, Rulfo, and Arguedas. According to Candido, such writers were producers of a “new kind of literature, which still addresses in a transfigurative way the subject which was once nativism” (196). ¹⁶ In addition to the lexical similarity between them (transfiguration/transculturation), it is important to note how the key concepts of Candido and Rama were the same. Ultimately, for both, transcultural literature would represent a form of the oscillations between old regionalism and modernism, making it possible to preserve, in a “super-regionalist” way, what modernization was supposed to annihilate (that is, the old regionalism).

Indeed, Rama quickly perceived the interchange of categories and sent a letter to his Brazilian friend (dated November 8, 1973), in which he acknowledged and enthusiastically celebrated the convergence. Rama wrote:

But if the transculturation model is the most influential version of the dialectic between universalism and localism in Rama’s work, there is also a lesser-known version of the critic’s theoretical approach to New Narrative which, from our point of view, is complementary and deserves more attention: the theory of “technification.” This theory addresses all the works of the movement we are discussing, not only the ones that prioritize regional subject matter. Although it has no equivalent in Candido’s work, Rama used this theory to address the same strategy of formation as mediation and conciliation, and, in this sense, can be understood as part of the reflections Candido and Rama shared about the Latin American novels of the 1950s and 1960s.

Late Modernism and Narrative Technification

Before dealing with Rama’s theory of technification, it is time to present the major art-historical category in which we have based our general approach to the New Narrative: the notion of “late modernism.” In A Singular Modernity (2002), Fredric Jameson argued that, during the decades that followed 1945, the world witnessed a revival of modernist formal devices and ideologies stemming from the artistic movements of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. He proposed calling the latter “high modernism,” and its post-1945 renewal, “late modernism”. According to Jameson, late modernism developed as an uneven international movement that responded to different national and regional situations. Nonetheless, common to all was a stress on artistic technique and formal mastery; and, on a more fundamental level, a strong defense of the principle of artistic autonomy inherited from high modernism. This principle functioned, to a greater or lesser extent, as an aesthetic ideology or doctrine, giving way, in many cases, to formalist art and formalist critique. ¹⁸

Although Jameson claimed that, as a global movement, late modernism presented an uneven development, he did not refer with any detail to cases outside the core regions (United States and Europe). In the present article, intending to complement this international framework, our strategy has been to approach Latin American New Narrative—its works as well as its theory—as an important peripheral variant of late modernism. In so doing, we hope to specify some singularities that would support the idea of an uneven global development. This unevenness, though suggested by Jameson, has not been, to our knowledge, worked through on a wider world frame. ¹⁹

As we have argued, and will continue in the pages that follow, in Rama and Candido’s approach to the New Narrative, strong artistic autonomy was not theorized in opposition to extra-artistic content. Rather, they assumed that in achieved artistic autonomy, authors and readers could (and should) sense a local quest for cultural, political and economic autonomy. This quest, we have suggested, was theorized as the second step of a project of local formation that sought to combine and reconcile, within modernist literary forms, both international and regional impulses. Thus, despite their major concern with artistic form, the version of late modernism advanced by Rama and Candido had little in common with aestheticist doctrines of art for art’s sake. For these critics, it seemed possible to assert, simultaneously, strong artistic autonomy and strong social function. In the last section, we noted an implicit connection between these seemingly opposed programs at the base of the “transculturation” theory. In this section, we will focus on how it presented itself in Angel Rama’s theory of “technification,” a theory that addresses another fundamental dimension of the New Narrative: an unprecedented local fascination with literary technique.

Rama elaborated this technicist tendency at length in a monographic 1981 essay with the title “La tecnificación narrativa.” ²⁰ In this text, the critic resumes and expands a set of ideas first presented in his earlier essay, “Diez problemas para el novelista latinoamericano” (1964). ²¹ According to Rama, from the 1940s onwards, in the historical context of local developmentalism and global technological revolution, the most advanced Latin American novelists sought technical models in modernist authors such as Joyce, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Musil, Hemingway, and Kafka. These international authors created “a set of technical innovations that transformed literature, but although they are intimately intertwined, in many cases, despite the essential unity of the work of art, they allow for curious transfers and instructive transformations” (84). ²² In Rama’s account, the experimentation with such transfers and transformations would have reached a systematic and general character in local literature during the 1950s and 1960s: “Lately we have seen the invasion of these forms in Latin America, in the young generation of the big cities” (84). ²³ Thus, Rama understood New Narrative as a movement initiated in the 1940s that actualized a set of formal devices drawn from first generation European and US modernist authors. Furthermore, he asserts that the standpoint from which this revival emerged was that of technicism.

Seeking an early model of the technicist impulse in Latin American New Narrative, Rama rescued a brief excerpt published in 1939 by the young Juan Carlos Onetti in the journal Marcha of Montevideo. This article, written at an initial stage of local developmentalism, argued for a collective catching-up effort in both artistic and economic terms:

In Rama’s view, this excerpt is an example of the most basic and naïve conception of peripheral literary technification, which he calls “technical operative model” (347). ²⁵ According to this model, artistic techniques constitute a neutral and universal repertoire, applicable to any material, under the optimistic assumption that the outcome would be, by necessity, positive. The writer isolates and appropriates techniques as if they were “a mode of intellectual work, that corresponds to international common law” (340). In opposition to neutral technique, local material would retain “a kind of privacy or interiority” (340). ²⁶ The operative model, according to Rama, undermines the capacity of the writer to perceive the “forceful bonds [of artistic technique] with the material” leading to a fetishization of technique: a formalist tour de force in order to catch-up with the modernist production of Europe and the United Sates (325). ²⁷

In a classical materialist fashion, Rama seems to approach the relationship between artistic technique and local material as if it corresponded to that between productive forces and nature. In his view, within a peripheral context, the process of technification unfolds in a singular manner. In the technique-producing core, the relationship between technique and local material would develop in a more organic vein, the former being produced in the same context as the latter. By contrast, in the developmentalist periphery, a structural unevenness expresses itself once again during the process of importing foreign technique to update local modernization. According to Rama, the Latin American writer should elaborate and correct this unevenness within modernist literary form. In his words: “There is a décalage that a novelist must know how to resolve” (87, emphasis added). ²⁸ It should be noticed that, as in “transculturation,” Rama presents post-1945 Latin American literary technification as if it were a new phase of the formation project: one that demanded that writers mediate and attenuate the intense unevenness that peripheral modernization produces (and reproduces). In his theory of technification, local writers bear the responsibility to “resolve” technically produced décalages.

Thus, reading the New Narrative from the perspective of this process of technification, Ángel Rama championed those literary works that sought formal balance and equilibrium between foreign technique and local material. After a first moment of naïve fascination and “sacralization of techniques” (corresponding to the aforementioned “operative model”), the local novelist should adopt a more mature attitude, which would allow him or her to introduce the same devices, now properly mastered, as one more element in the overall composition. ²⁹ Rama presented Garcia Márquez and the late Onetti as models for this mature attitude towards technique. Focusing on the latter, we could suggest that, while the interest of a novella such as Los adioses (1954) seems grounded in a spectacular and baffling control of point of view technique (à la Henry James), producing a game of snares for the reader, works like Una tumba sin nombre (1959) or El astillero (1962) reveal a technical mastery that, without losing its force, passes to the background, giving way to a more balanced overall form. We can observe an analogous path in García Márquez. If the presentation of consciousness through modernist formal devices seemed the fundamental concern in a story like “Monólogo de Isabel viendo llover en Macondo” (1955), in Cien años de soledad (1967) the author reached an extraordinary formal balance and consistency, presupposing rather than showing off his technical mastery of the medium. As a critic, Rama made a strong defense of this mature attitude towards literary technique, always within the framework of formation.

However, in the last part of the 1981 essay, Rama focuses on a second path of technification that we will call the strident path. The critic advanced a weaker and more hesitant defense of this particular path. His major example is La casa verde (1966) by the young Mario Vargas Llosa. It could be said that this novel repeated, in a more advanced moment of peripheral technification, the catching-up logic proper to the operative model. Nevertheless, in La casa verde, a strong and exuberant technical impulse coexists with an equally intense effort at probing local material. Far from a mere technicist formalism, Vargas Llosa seems to have worked rigorously within the formative program that Rama defended for the New Narrative: seeking to reconcile, in a consistent literary form, the lacerating dualisms resulting from the gap between international up-to-date technique and local material. But, in this case, the result turned out, according to the Uruguayan critic, strident and unbalanced (the Spanish term used by Rama is the word “chirriante,” or shrill):

In this passage, we believe it important to notice a brief departure, or deviation, from the orthodox project of formation. Instead of rejecting La casa verde for not achieving balanced form, for not being able to point to a possible reconciliation of intense unevenness, Rama realizes that, in this case, there is something eloquent and true about formal dissonance: he feels, and judges, against his main defense of the balanced path, that in this strident form a “protest” has been consigned.

We would like to suggest that this unexpected aesthetic judgement finds its historical basis in a negative diagnosis of the Latin American developmentalist project that Rama presented in this same essay. From the standpoint of 1981, the Uruguayan critic changed, or hardened, his evaluation of recent regional modernization, arguing that the developmental illusions of the recent past

Such a diagnosis was in tune with an increasing number of negative reappraisals of Latin American developmentalism that, from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, began to arise in the fields of sociology, economics, history and critical theory. In these reappraisals it was argued that the catching-up logic that, from a regional point of view, appeared so promising in the 1940s and 1950s, was a grand illusion. ³² Once the global picture was factored in (particularly the determinant role that the technological-cybernetic revolution led by the core countries would play in structuring the world political economy in the second half of the twentieth century), the Latin American developmentalist effort appeared, retrospectively, in a much gloomier light. Such a pessimistic perspective certainly was not in sight for the collective that undertook the modernization project and for the authors and critics that engaged in late modernist movements.

If, retrospectively, we accept some version of this negative diagnosis of Latin American developmentalism, it follows that Rama’s defense of a balanced and organic form of literary technification will easily appear to the contemporary mind as unconvincing and, perhaps, doctrinaire. Subject to the modernizing rhythms imposed by the core countries, the gap or mismatch between advanced technique and local material, far from diminishing, seemed only to increase during the 1960s and 1970s. Given this tendency, a change of the symbolic valence of the process of technification in the cultural and artistic spheres would seem natural. Rather than signifying, or standing for, an autonomous modernization project (as it did for the young Onetti and his post-1945 generation), shouldn’t up-to-date technique start to signal, at some point in the process, a movement of international integration with a disadvantageous character? A subordination? In such a case, we should not be surprised to notice that, at some point in the literary trajectory of many authors guided by the principle “resolve the décalage,” there is the emergence of formal deadlocks and a sense of impossibility, of the absurd, of frustration and of melancholy.

The uneasy, ambivalent, and seemingly irresoluble peripheral relationship with advanced technique points to the limitations of Rama’s demand for a late modernism regulated by the idea of taming and reconciling in modernist form the mismatches of the social process rather than stressing the dissonances. It is worth noting that, in the 1981 essay, despite having incorporated the mentioned negative diagnosis, Rama did not substantially modify his defense of a balanced path of literary technification. However, his hesitations when referring to the alternative, strident, path of artistic technification seem to point toward a formal possibility that, as we will argue in the next section, opens new ways of thinking about Latin American New Narrative beyond the orthodoxies of the model of formation.

Summarizing: we have argued that Ángel Rama and Antonio Candido established categories that are necessary for an understanding of what Latin American New Narrative was, and what it stood for, as a literary movement. It was, in our view, a peripheral variant of late modernism that thrived within a collective formation project, that, during the post-1945 period, was intertwined with developmentalist illusions that had national as well as regional content. We believe that this literary movement can be understood as basically sustained by two important social-historical assumptions: (1) a connection between the principle of aesthetic autonomy and the project of political and economic autonomy (national and regional); (2) a connection between artistic technification and the developmentalist project that, initiated in a naïve and optimistic “operative model”, would gain, in its confrontation with local material and local social experience, a political dimension that resists mere application of up-to-date techniques.

A Dissonant Approach to Latin American New Narrative

The pertinence of the conciliatory requirement in the formation’s classic line of thought presupposed a process of modernization that was both positive and viable on the grounds that it could create higher levels of social integration and organicity. However, as we already mentioned, the historical process went through a different route, thus forcing a change of diagnosis (a diagnosis which Rama shared to some extent). To describe how this occurred, we will focus our analysis specifically on the change of assumptions brought about in Latin America by military dictatorships, mainly after the 1964 coup d’etat in Brazil. In his classic text, “Cultura e Política, 1964-1969.” ³³ Originally published in 1970, Roberto Schwarz argued that the autonomous development cycle of the sixties was over and had come to an “imperialist integration . . . which modernized the country’s economy for its own ends” and thus this new period of “modernization, once liberating and national, took the form of submission” (87). Furthermore, the meaning of the year 1964 would not only be national, but regional: “In 1964, the military regime was established in Brazil to buttress the capital and the continent against communism” (71). ³⁴

This fundamental fact shifted the meaning of national progress to the right, draining the possibilities of autonomous formation and promoting a new sort of national development submissive to imperialism and deprived of its original integrative sense (the ultimate example being Pinochet’s Chile, which, from the seventies on, turned out to be a neoliberal laboratory for the “Chicago boys”). Amid the onset of this new cycle, the widespread social disintegration that followed the Latin American coups increased significantly in the seventies and eighties, which, in the realm of literature, spawned work from new theorists.

In this new scenario, suggesting a dialectical movement of conservation and breakthrough following the model originally proposed by Candido, Roberto Schwarz wrote, at the turn of the millennium, that the idea of formation,

Nonetheless, the few elements of modernization that were formed—in the areas of culture and literature—could then be “used in the market of cultural differences or even in tourism” (57). After all, they were illusions that “it would be better to abandon” “for the sake of realism” (57). ³⁶

Such considerations about the dead ends of formation also have a retrospective value: the New Narrative and its theorists were investing in an unfeasible project. And although Candido and Rama had accounted for the possibility of the failure of autonomous modernization, thus hesitating to advocate it as if it were inevitable, neither considerably changed his general aesthetic position on the matter, and thus they both continued to focus on the conciliatory assumptions of the formative project. Today, in contrast, for a theory of late modernism, such reflection comes across as narrow, requiring a revision to face the new historical moment.

On this question, it is important to say that, despite having realized the consequences that the shift of diagnosis could have for literary criticism, Schwarz himself has not elaborated a systematic way to reappraise the late modernist novels written in Brazil during the fifties and sixties. Instead, after identifying the contradictions of an innocent technification in the Brazilian movement “tropicalismo,” he turned at length to the mature work of Machado de Assis in search of a dissonant and caustic formal model better tuned to grasp and illuminate the complexities of Brazilian (and Latin American) failed modernization and formation. ³⁷ He would later place emphasis on narratives from the eighties and nineties—such as O nome do bispo (1985), by Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares or Estorvo (1991) by Chico Buarque—which were published after the idea of formation tout court had already been discarded.

Thus, having identified the change in scenario, Schwarz suggested a corresponding change of orientation concerning artistic form and critical discourse. In relation to what we have called Latin American New Narrative, it would be possible to start from Schwarz’s ambivalent diagnosis of the formative process, studying not the conciliatory orientation but rather the dissonant structure of the literary works themselves. After all, in this case of peripheral late modernism, the inorganic tendencies which Rama and Candido highlighted as a starting point to be overcome, didn’t become more controllable or less lacerating, but rather intensified to the point of inducing a terminal crisis for the New Narrative.

This breaking point appears at the highest intensity in a work like El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971) by José Maria Arguedas, written at the beginning of the sixties. Raising to extreme limits features of the “strident” line which Rama has noted in the first works of Vargas Llosa, Arguedas’s last novel reveals the dead ends of the conciliatory notion of formation. In this work, the author intended to narrate the process of modernization of the Peruvian seaside which, in a few decades, stimulated by North American investments, would become the biggest fishing industry in the world by the seventies. The novelist’s idea, which was loyal to his literary project, was to have two characters of mythical folklore—the fox from above (from the indigenous pre-modern sierra) and the fox from below (which had come from the seaside and witnessed the modernization)—as a narrative frame. However, the narrated content itself seems to overwhelm the possibility of narrating, exploding the autonomous form, which shatters into autobiographical diaries of the writer telling about his own painful process of depression and suicide. At the same time, the diaries dramatize, as a counterpoint to the fictional chapters, the impossibility of finding formal solutions to narrate the heterogeneous and inorganic development of the region. When defending the hypothesis of an ultimate rupture by Arguedas with the assumptions of what we have called late modernism, the British critic Jean Franco sees the writer’s posthumous novel as a dead end for the principle of aesthetic autonomy: “Clearly the autonomy of the literary text on which the modernist project had been based and within which national projects had been contained was by now irreparably damaged” (11). ³⁸

Paying attention to this heterogeneous and inorganic tendency of autonomous modernization, which radically explodes from the sixties on, it seems important to rethink the function of the principle of narrative’s autonomy. Narrative, from this point of view, would not be a balanced and conciliatory element, as Candido and Rama thought, but rather a formal model capable—at least during the cycle of democratic national development—of containing dualist struggles which would become increasingly lacerating. In this case, a theory of late modernism focused on the other side of the formative process would be able to reconsider the modernist form in light of its capacity to scan the contradictions of the period’s historical subject matter. From this perspective, the New Narrative, placed in the literary formation, would be seen from an angle of incomplete formation; that is, as a group of works which, even when they reach a high level of coherence and formal balance, demonstrate through their plot and other formal mechanisms the impossibility of modern autonomous subjects and communities. ³⁹

Within this critical perspective, it would be possible to rethink the case of works such as El astillero (1962) and Cien años de soledad (1967), taken by Rama as paradigms of high formal coherence and aesthetic autonomy. In Onetti’s novel, for instance, the complex elaboration of historical subject matter—the stagnation of modernization projects in the region of the Río de la Plata (Uruguay and Argentina)—displaces the problem of artistic techniques to a secondary plane. Nevertheless, frustrated socioeconomic technification becomes the main theme of the plot: a huge shipyard with a glorious past is kept running by the main character Larsen – the manager – who willingly ignores the fact that the company has gone bankrupt. The “regular” functioning of the modern structure of the shipyard, then, becomes a cynical fiction which the novel’s hero, the workers, and the population of the town keep alive so that they don’t have to admit the ultimate end of their illusions in a modernizing cycle which, in the narrative, has already ended. Thus, the shipyard workers compensate for the non-existence of wages by selling the shipyard’s old-fashioned machinery to Russians – who were also, by that time, beginning to lose ground in the technological race led by the West. That is, formally speaking, the novel is modern, fully achieved and consistent; however, the plot’s content goes in the opposite direction. Here, with no formal stridency, the modernist work of Onetti reveals a tough internal contradiction clearly linked to the dead ends of local formation and modernization.

The same could be said about Cien años de soledad – a novel of impressive technical coherence, which borrows narrative procedures from Borges, but tells the story of the frustrated modernization process of Macondo. After a series of interrupted projects and civil wars and after a period of bloody imperialist exploitation by a transnational rural company, the fictional universe of García Márquez ends up isolated until the coming of a deadly hurricane which destroys the town while its last character is eaten alive by ants. As in Onetti’s novel, the modernist work tells a story of historical defeat.

To read Latin American late modernism from the standpoint of dissonance (whether emphasizing the contradiction between achieved modernist form and a content that keeps referring to disastrous modernization, as in Onetti and García Márquez, or emphasizing formal stridency, as in Vargas Llosa and Arguedas) is, perhaps, better tuned to contemporary minds well aware of the shortcomings and failures of local (and global) modernist projects. A close reading of the best works of the New Narrative, a reading sensitive to their contradictions and formal dissonance, reveals that these authors were far from naïve about the illusions of modernization.

Conclusion

The reappraisal of Latin American New Narrative, from the standpoint of dissonance, could count as an intervention, among others, for a renewed discussion on the category of autonomy, whose possible survival or transformation, seems to be a key critical issue of our contemporaneity. It could also, in this sense, contribute to renewing interest in Latin American novels of the 1950s and 1960s that registered an important period in the history of the continent and, currently, seem relegated to a place of less prestige among critics, who understand them sometimes in terms of a technical developmentalism that History has undermined, sometimes in terms of concepts that contribute to confusing the debate (such as "magical realism", among others).

Like few other places, Latin America has writers whose claims to literary autonomy have revealed interesting tensions for understanding a complex and conflicting historical process of global and local modernization. Renewing the discussion about this process (both literary and historical) may perhaps allow new understandings of Latin American New Narrative as a fascinating and contradictory case of late modernism, in a context in which concepts such as "development" and "modernization" already seem anachronistic, and in which contemporary critics and writers of different orientations tend to discard the notion of autonomy altogether, without fully understanding its complexities and the critical contents it was able to express during our crucial developmentalist period.

An earlier version of the arguments developed in this article was published in Portuguese in Revista Garrafa 17, no.48 (2019). https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.... The authors translated this article for FORMA, making minor alterations to the original essay.

Jorge Manzi holds a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of São Paulo. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where he specializes in Latin American modern and contemporary narrative.

Gabriel dos Santos Lima is a post-doctoral student at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in Brazil, where he conducts research on the critical works of Antonio Candido and Ángel Rama. In 2019, he taught courses at the University of São Paulo (USP) on the work of Antonio Candido. From 2017 to 2018, he worked as a substitute professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at UFSCar. Gabriel is also organizer and co-author of the book "Estudos do Romance Brasileiro no Século XXI" (2022, Editora Fi). He has a PhD in Literary Theory from USP, which included a doctoral internship at Yale University (USA). He received an honorable mention in the 2020 USP Postgraduate Video Award for the doctoral thesis "Modernist Romance and Catastrophic Consciousness: Rereading Literature and Underdevelopment, by Antonio Candido."