THE SYNCHRONIC STRUCTURES that I discuss in this chapter and the fragmentary structures that I will discuss in the next one are related in their awareness of the multiple and often contradictory traditions they inherit, modify and pass along. In both chapters, I discuss writers who use historical and narrative fragments to challenge the progressive linearity of positivism and positivism's preeminent literary form, the novel. But their narrative strategies allow me to make distinctions among them. Whereas Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar create structural and/or metaphoric wholes in which fragments may be endlessly included, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman and Sandra Cisneros resist that possibility, flaunting the fragments as such.

IREFERRED IN MY INTRODUCTION to Georg Lukács' observation concerning the parallel development in the eighteenth century of the novel and the modern conception of history. Hegelian historicism found its appropriate literary form (or, rather, produced it) in the realistic novel. The Borgesian “modest history” that concluded the previous chapter and the magical realist ghosts that will appear in the next one are mitigating circumstances – disruptions of linear, causal, Hegelian (“realistic”) narrative structures. In this chapter, I consider a number of realistic novels as well as other “provisional” schemes, to use Borges′ term cited in my epigraph, that purport to record history: newspapers and photojournalism.

THAT FAT OLD MAN in faded overalls is well suited to introduce this study of the historical imagination in U.S. and Latin American fiction. History has indeed been one of the severest figures of the America's collective imagination. The barnyard fairly reeks of that familiar historical anxiety, the motivation and theme of so much of our fiction. There he goes now, clutching his instruments, terrorizing those dumb clucks whose collective fate he seals. Then again, he's fickle, so tomorrow we may get corn. But what's this? History hobbles? Or is he hobbled by the writers who created him? After all, they too travel along that apocalyptic road to Pittsfield, Babylon. We might easily mistake Charles Simic's old man for the eighth deadly sin in some medieval morality play, ready to take the stage with the likes of gluttony and lust and avarice. But no. He is, in fact, the first deadly sin of the novel.

I WANT TO DISCUSS a final means by which usable pasts are created in contemporary American literature. Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña (The Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976) and Luis Rafael Sánchez's La guaracha del Macho Camacho, (Macho Camacho's Beat, 1976) demonstrate how communities and traditions may be constructed from the clichés of popular, nonprint media: radio and television, popular music, and the movies. Their intertextuality is less Borgesian than Flaubertian; like Flaubert (and generally unlike Borges) their fiction mixes levels and forms of discourse – musical rhythms and lines, visual forms, spoken languages. In the celebrated phrase from Madame Bovary (1856) that I have cited as my epigraph, Flaubert suggests the problem with which he did lifelong battle and the paradox that lies at the core of all literary art: how to transform these common discursive forms into literature.

I HAVE CONSIDERED the different historiographic heritages of U.S. and Latin American fiction and consequent generic arguments about the nature of realism: how (and whether) historical experience can be remembered, reported, and (re)created in words. I now want to turn to literary works that enlarge these definitions of history by resuscitating figures from the past that the realist novel ordinarily excludes. These figures are ghosts, and I will be conjuring a number of them in order to consider how they are embodied (or not) in particular works of prose fiction; whether they are visible (and if so, to whom and why); and whether they speak, eat, or dream. An investigation of the nature of literary ghosts will tell us a great deal about their authors' philosophy and poetics of history – how they understand and embody the past in literary structures. The frequent appearance of ghosts in magical realism and romance suggests current redefinitions of the self and runs parallel to redefinitions of positivism such as Borges' “modest history,” to which I referred earlier. Borges will again play an important role in my comparative discussion, as will Octavio Paz. Borges and Paz are consistently engaged in comparing literatures and cultures in the Americas – our different versions of Western civilization, as Paz puts it in his essay “Mexico and the United States.”

THIS PASSAGE IS FROM the ninth of eighteen narrative fragments written by the Jewish-German philosopher Walter Benjamin in 1940, the last year of his life. Benjamin's Angelus Novus refers to a particular angel, created of ink, chalk, and brown wash on paper by the Swiss painter Paul Klee (see frontispiece).

WHETHER THE WRITER self-consciously recuperates or invents usable precursors is, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, beside the point. The writer's medium requires it, no matter whether he or she intends it. As a phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty generalizes about all speaking subjects; as a literary critic, I want to specify particular works and consider how they “implant onto each other,” how they construct the “becoming of truth” that Merleau-Ponty describes. I agree with Merleau-Ponty that all cultural texts are intertexts, but writers and readers respond to their textual traditions in different ways and for different purposes, often according to the importance given by a culture to its own history and the history of its interactions with other cultures.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, in his 1939 essay “Against the Weather,” drew early attention to the American tendency to create inclusive structures. I have already cited his statement on the “power of mutation” required of New World writers to accommodate their multiple traditions. Williams would have understood this need for inclusive structures better than most, his name a literal cipher of his own converging heritages of Hispanic and Anglo-American cultures (his mother was Puerto Rican, his father Anglo-American). Surely his awareness of both traditions explains his fervent interest in the interactions of the New World's cultures and histories. On Europeans immigrating to the New World, Williams wrote: “It was liberty they needed, not so much liberty for freedom's sake but liberty to partake of, to be included in and to conserve. Liberty, in this sense, has the significance of inclusion rather than a breaking away.” Here he describes the American anxiety of origins as an appetite for inclusion, and the artist as the agent of its expression. For Williams, “the significance of inclusion” is not homogenization or unification but the countenancing of multiple, coexisting, conflictual, unfinished histories. Not peace but possibility.

THE USABLE PAST began as I was writing a book on apocalyptic historicism in contemporary U.S. and Latin American fiction. As I worked on that project, I found that I was persistently drawn to investigate other attitudes toward history and literary tradition besides the apocalyptic, in part to test my hypotheses about American apocalypticism and in part, no doubt, to counterbalance the peculiar intensities of that mode. As I strayed from Armageddon, I repeatedly encountered a contrasting impulse to create precursors rather than cancel them. This other impulse involved a characteristic historical awareness – what I call an anxiety of origins – with respect to New World cultural histories and traditions. In my introduction I establish connections between this anxiety and the narrative energies that constitute usable histories and traditions. How these energies operate in selected works of U.S. and Latin American fiction is the subject of the chapters that follow.

My title is drawn from Van Wyck Brooks' essay, “On Creating a Usable Past,” and signals the ambivalence (often ironic) of history in a “new” world. “Usable” implies the active engagement of a user or users, through whose agency collective and personal histories are constituted. The term thus obviates the possibility of innocent history, but not the possibility of authentic history when it is actively imagined by its user(s).

IN THESE SCHEMATIC SENTENCES, deployed typographically as I have reproduced them here, Carlos Fuentes places in opposition what he proposes as the current conceptions of history in the U.S. and Latin America. And in what is after more than four decades still the single most influential comparative treatment of the cultures of the Americas, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950), Octavio Paz precedes Fuentes in contrasting the historical visions of the U.S. and Mexico. Paz also assigns to the U.S. the historical character that Hegel imputed to the entire hemisphere: a place without a past, with only a future. But if Latin America's view of the past is first presented as starkly opposed to that of the U.S., a second look reveals that the two views share a common characteristic: their lack of resolution. Fuentes follows Hegel strikingly in his assertion that the past is not yet usable anywhere in America: if the U.S. has too completely assimilated its past, rendering it inaccessible, Latin America has incompletely assimilated its history, to the same effect.