In 1955 Juan Rulfo published his sole novel, Pedro Páramo. It followed a collection of short stories, El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain), in 1953. Apart from a few more stories added to subsequent editions, some film-scripts, and a promised second novel that never fully appeared, to be titled La cordillera, that was the sum of Rulfo’s fictional work. The story of how such a meager output could attain canonic status, both within Mexico and abroad through translation, is itself instructive for the novel was poorly reviewed when it first appeared, and took four years to sell the first 1,000 copies of a first edition of 2,000 copies.

In a general way, Rulfo’s rural fiction offers a mirror into which local and foreign readers can explore the complex identity of what it meant to be Mexican in the twentieth century. The plot of this inquiry into identity follows an abandoned son setting out to confront his father. This personal quest is framed in a fiction that recreates the shattering experiences of the so-called Mexican Revolution (1910-20), especially how the decade of violence and the consequent jostling for power initiated the massive migration from the countryside to the city. This social phenomenon of migration to the cities is not solely due to political upheavals, for it happened across all Latin America. In 1928 Mexico City (México D. F.) reached 1 million inhabitants. Today, the rough figure is somewhere between 18 and 23 million. Juan Rulfo (1918-86) was but one of these urban migrants in his move from the state of Jalisco to the capital Mexico City.

Focused on a cataclysm at the end of an era, Mario Vargas Llosa’s monumental 1981 novel, La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World) also appears to want to signal the end of history - or at least the collapse of ideologies that drive it. Furthermore, in its running commentary on the uses of fiction, on the intellectual’s place in the interpretation of history, this enormous novel seems to herald an end to storytelling. Vargas Llosa has elsewhere referred to the writer’s vocation as “a daily and furious immolation,” and it is notable that he should have chosen a novel about a conflagration to set forth one of his clearest - and most polemical - statements on the force of literature.

The novel has as much to do with storytelling as it is does with history, foregrounding the responsibility of the Latin American writer towards pivotal events. In the wake of his own political realignment - an initial euphoria after the Cuban Revolution followed by a proclaimed loss of faith in political utopias - Vargas Llosa has delineated his position on fiction in stark terms: “I have nothing against fictions […] But there are benign and malign fictions, those that enrich human experience and those that impoverish it and are a source of violence” (MW, 300). This very notion has, ironically, polarized criticism of the novel. Where more formally minded readers have placed La guerra del fin del mundo in the former camp, politically oriented critics have been made uneasy by a series of assumptions and assertions which structure the novel: among them, the notion that the writer can step outside ideology to comment on history from a vantage point of “common sense.”

Literary tradition can be defined in terms of a select corpus of texts that have held meaning for readers and critics. In the case of a homoerotic tradition, it is worth reflecting on whether what is at stake is the mention of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender practices in literature, whether the sexuality of the authors is central, whether the works are judged “authentic” (which for many signifies the presence of positive images), whether they express an esthetics that is in some sense “queer,” whether they have some political content that ties them to programs of sexual liberation, and whether they are worth thinking about as works of literature. These questions are not even parallel to one another in terms of the semantic fields or epistemologies they invoke, so the difficulties of defining a tradition are obvious. Taking them one by one, then:

Is it sufficient for there to be gay and lesbian “themes” in a novel to claim it for such a tradition? Works as diverse as Mario Vargas Llosa’s Los cachorros (The Cubs, 1967), Conversación en la Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969), and Historia de Mayta (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1984), Julio Cortázar’s Los premios (The Winners, 1960) and Leonardo Padura’s Máscaras(“Masks,”1996) have gay male characters, and Alúisio Azevedo’s O cortiço (A Brazilian Tenement, 1890), Juan Carlos Onetti’s Dejemos hablar al viento (Let the Wind Speak, 1979), and Rosario Castellanos’s Album de familia (“Family album,” 1971) have lesbian characters, but it is our contention that this is not sufficient to define these works as part of a Latin American homoerotic tradition, at least in the terms that we will be setting out here.

Nabokov's reputation rests to such a degree on his achievements as a prose writer that it is easy to overlook his entry into literature as a poet. In this regard he is reminiscent of two illustrious predecessors, Ivan Turgenev and Ivan Bunin, both of whom similarly began by writing poetry. Turgenev, though, quickly realized that his true talent was in prose and soon abandoned verse. Bunin, in contrast, was more similar to Nabokov in that he did not forsake poetry after turning to prose but continued to compose verse, albeit with decreasing frequency, throughout his career. However, as the recipient of the Pushkin Prize in 1903, Bunin had achieved some renown for his verse, while Nabokov, who expressed admiration for Bunin's poetry and was apparently influenced by it, would likely have remained a footnote in literary history had he not begun to write prose.

Nabokov’s interest in poetry nonetheless figures prominently in his reputation as a major literary figure. In his translation of Pushkin’s great novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, Nabokov purposely did not use rhyme or adhere to the iambic tetrameter of the original, asserting that to do so would mean sacrificing literal accuracy. He then attacked a rhymed and metrical translation by Walter Arndt that appeared at about the same time. The resulting intense debate over the relative merits of the two approaches continues to resonate. Pale Fire, among his best and most complex novels in English, begins with a 999-line poem in heroic couplets (iambic hexameter verse with each pair of lines rhyming). Bits of Russian poetry sometimes occur in his English novels; thus he inserts “Vliublennost” (“Being in Love”), which in some ways resembles his own early love poetry, in the quasi-autobiographical Look at the Harlequins! (25 [pt. 1, ch. 5]), and parodies Anna Akhmatova and her imitators in Pnin (56 [ch. 2], 181 [ch. 7]). His last Russian novel, The Gift, includes more than two dozen poems or poetic fragments, most ostensibly written by the quasi-autobiographical protagonist.

According to many testimonies, like García Márquez’s exact contemporary the Mexican Carlos Fuentes or the Colombian critic many years younger than both, Michael Palencia Roth, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) is the one novel where Latin Americans recognize themselves instantly: their own social, cultural reality, their families, and the history of their countries. It is also the mirror in which a generation of Europeans and North Americans, by the millions, since its publication have discovered the magical reality of an exotic continent, and a taste for its hallucinatory literature. Are they reading the same novel?

One dimension of the “magical realism” which has been seen to characterize the novel is the simultaneous invocation of different mentalities, genres, sorts of truth and experience. The homely and the banal, the content of the hagiographical and the style of the chronicle come together when the priest can levitate only after imbibing drinking chocolate. A similar combination gives Remedios ascending to heaven and Fernanda’s annoyance at losing her sheets in the ascension. The conjunction of genres generates synesthesia, the mixing of different senses: “un delicado viento de luz” (“a delicate wind of light”). The metaphor and the literal come together when Remedios, as femme fatale, has her suitors die from falls into latrines, kicks to the head from stallions, gun shots. The economic power of the United Fruit Company is translated into meteorological omnipotence when it causes a rainstorm of four years eleven months and two days. One dimension does not cancel or neutralize the other or fuse with it: the prose moves with apparent effortlessness from one to the other, as a Moebius strip.

The Latin American Novel encompasses a rich body of literary works written primarily in Spanish and Portuguese. Its main corpus is drawn principally from the over twenty Spanish-speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere and from Portuguese-speaking Brazil. The Companion to the Latin American Novel is intended to underscore literary contributions while offering a broad overview of the novel’s history, and a sense of its heterogeneity, highlighting regions whose cultural and geopolitical particularities are often overlooked in general reference or introductory works. This volume should make it evident that there are as many commonalities and differences between Spanish and Portuguese-language novels as between those of different regions and ethnic constituents in Latin America, and it includes women writers throughout while also recognizing the significance of the gender and sexuality approach which has become fundamental to many critics and literary historians. It also recognizes the growing interest in translation studies in Latin American literary and cultural studies.

On “Latin America”

The term “Latin America” has been controversial since it was first coined by the French to justify their colonial designs on the Western Hemisphere after the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1807. It became useful, especially in the twentieth century, to group together historical, political, cultural, and artistic phenomena that cut across national boundaries. The label is readily used today in the United States, the Commonwealth, France, and Germany, while in Spain there is a preference for the term Hispano América (“Spanish America”) to single out literary works in the Spanish language.

“[T]he motifs of Chernyshevski's life are now obedient to me,” Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev tells his imagined reader in Nabokov's Gift. “I have tamed its themes, they have become accustomed to my pen; with a smile I let them go: in the course of development they merely describe a circle, like a boomerang or a falcon, in order to end by returning to my hand; and even if any should fly far away, beyond the horizon of my page, I am not perturbed; it will fly back . . .” (Gift, 236-37 [ch. 4]).

The Gift, written in 1935–1937, is a perfect, concrete place to ground our general discussion of major trends in Nabokov’s art of biographical and autobiographical presentation, for the novel richly contains them all. In addition to the “real” biography of N. G. Chernyshevski, a nineteenth-century Russian writer, publicist, and political activist (chapter 4), it features an unfinished biographical sketch of Fyodor’s father (chapter 2), which contains themes from the life of Nabokov’s own father; and it also presents a “fictional” biographical exposé of Berlin émigré and Chernyshevski namesake, Yasha Chernyshevski (chapter 1). Furthermore, the novel as a whole is one of the classic examples of an autobiographical Bildungsroman, akin to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Politics has a sex because sex is our first politics, our first agency, our first subjection. Over the long sweep of history, collective representation, the capacity to stand for the collectivity, to speak in its name, has been gendered. Men have historically dominated the public sphere, their bodies massed, displayed, and sacrificed as the primary medium and content of collective representation. Women are absent, off-stage, or more recently, play minor parts. If the public sphere, and the collective body conjured into symbol there, is male, it presumably has a penis; but the fact is that its sex, its erotic energies, have gone largely un-theorized. If we are to understand the logic of collective representation we must align its symbolization with its sex.

In this chapter, I wish to explore the sexuality of collective representation as achieved in ancient rituals as interpreted by Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, the founders of sociology and psychoanalysis respectively. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ([1912] 1995) (hereafter Elementary Forms) and Totem and Taboo ([1913] 1946), both studied the “totemism” of the aboriginal tribes of Australia which they argued was the simplest and hence the earliest religion. For both, collective representation was the creation of a collective body through the individual bodies of men. While scholarship has accumulated requiring revision of the empirical materials upon which they based their theories, their theories are still studied and taught without reference to it, as modalities of thinking, as our own totemic representations.

The regional novel from the first decades of the twentieth century marks a turning point in Latin American narrative. In the 1960s, Latin American writers became world leaders in combining technical innovation with commercial success and critical acclaim. However, what came to be known as the Boom novel would not have been possible without advances made in the preceding decades. Beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century, Latin America experienced economic expansion and relative political stability. These changes were accompanied by the consolidation of liberal political institutions that eliminated many vestiges of Colonial society. The regionalist writers of the early twentieth century came to grips with these changes by drawing on international influences and local cultures to generate new narrative forms. The eminent Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama’s outline of this phenomenon remains the most important social periodization of Latin American narrative in the early twentieth century, and his work usefully suggests that the regional novel can be defined in part through its engagement with the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that structure models of citizenship and cultural belonging.

The corpus of texts to be addressed under “regionalism” is not obvious. The most apparent inclusion would be the novelas de la tierra, or telluric novels, that describe local realities through nature, rural life, and cultural traits understood as peculiar to Latin America. In the 1930s, Concha Meléndez had already identified this body of works, now established in the literary canon. As Carlos Alonso has argued, even if these novels rely on problematic concepts of representation, they played a crucial role in defining Latin America’s cultural modernity, particularly as a response to US Pan-Americanism and as an expression of revitalization one hundred years after independence.

Applied to translation, the phrase “X said” is more remarkable than appears at first glance. It certainly is useful, as just now to quote St. Jerome's exasperated depiction of the translator's work. Even so, to use it is to ignore a half-truth, for the phrase cannot mean what it says. The patron saint of translators composed his one-liner in Latin, while the English words on which I must rely to read it belong to the translator. So “X said” is no more than a shorthand. And as a shorthand, moreover, “X said” obscures what it abbreviates. Two statements of disparate origin, not one, inhabit every translation: what X said and what X has been made to say. Those two statements are forever distinct and variously related. As the first translator, in 1915, of Durkheim's 1912 masterpiece, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (hereafter Elementary Forms), Joseph Ward Swain invented many statements of the second, made-to-say kind. Re-translating Elementary Forms in 1995, so did I. My own statements, like Swain's, bear different kinds and qualities of relationship to the original. I propose to explore some of the relationships that matter when English is the language in which Elementary Forms is to be read.

In 1950 Vladimir Nabokov, then an aspiring American author, wrote in chapter 14 of Conclusive Evidence, a Memoir, about his Russian literary career of the 1920s and 1930s as if he and Sirin (Nabokov's Russian pen name) were two different persons:

Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits, 1982) tells the tale of the political struggle between the Left and the Right in twentieth century Chile which led to Augusto Pinochet’s coup d'état on September 11, 1973, and the imposition thereafter of a repressive, right-wing military dictatorship. Its novelty is that it does so from the vantage point of the lives of three generations of women - Clara (grandmother), Blanca (mother), and Alba (granddaughter) - though Clara’s husband, Esteban Trueba, fulfills an important mediating function within the novel, as we shall see. Like Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), the structural impetus of Allende’s novel is provided by genealogy rather than plot, though the family line traced is male-centered in the former but feminocentric in the latter. Indeed, the “house” in the title of La casa de los espíritus functions paradigmatically as an image of the intrinsically feminine.

The obvious similarities between the two novels, indeed, have led some to question the originality of Allende’s novel. In a revealing interview Allende made the following self-deprecatory comment: “Me siento como un pirata que se hubiera lanzado al abordaje de las letras” (“I feel like a pirate who has boarded the ship of letters”). There are a number of ways of interpreting this statement. One - the more cynical - is to take it as an admission of plagiarism of Gabriel García Márquez’s fiction, with which her work has so often been compared.

By the middle of the 1930s, Nabokov, writing since 1920 under the pen name “V. Sirin,” had achieved an enviable reputation as the leading Russian émigré writer of prose fiction. Publication of Dar (The Gift, written 1933-1938) and Priglashenie na kazn (Invitation to a Beheading, 1935-1936) was to put this beyond question. However, by late 1939, the Nabokovs were preparing for an imminent new life in the English-speaking world. In May 1940, as famously described at the close of Speak, Memory, they left Europe for New York, on what was to be the penultimate voyage of the liner Champlain - just before the fall of Paris. One meteoric career, that of the exiled Russian writer Sirin, was effectively over. A second and, in world terms, rather more explosive career, that of the American-English writer “Vladimir Nabokov,” was about to be launched.

Few of our contemporaries remember, and fewer still deserve to be rebuked if they do not, that when it first appeared in the vocabulary of incipient and inchoate sociology the word “society” was but a metaphor, and a metaphor of the most common, “here-like-there” kind, a kind usually deployed with the intention to domesticate something strange and make intelligible something heretofore unfamiliar and baffling. After all, two centuries or so have passed since that word had been deployed in metaphorical capacity. The mark of well-chosen and persuasive metaphors is that their metaphorical - interpretative - nature tends to be quickly forgotten and is no more noted. True to its metaphorical status, the word “society” was originally meant to focus attention on some otherwise blurry facets of the thing of which it claimed to be (newly) referent, thereby playing down the significance of that thing's confusing (and for that reason alarming) idiosyncrasy.

The facet of human experience which it was hoped would be laid bare or insinuated by the choice of “society” as the metaphor for the setting of human life-pursuits, was that of “being in company.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “fellowship,” “companionship,” “association with one's fellow men, esp. in a friendly or intimate manner” were the oldest meanings of the word “society.” There were other meanings too, all preceding the adoption of the word for metaphorical purposes - like “a number of persons associated together by some common interest and purpose” (first recorded in 1548); “the state or condition of living in association, company or intercourse with others of the same species”; “adopted by a body of individuals for the purpose of harmonious co-existence or for mutual benefit, defence, etc.” (1553); “a corporate body of persons having a definite place of residence” (1588); or the “aggregate of persons living together with a more or less ordered community” (1639).

I should like to steal up on Nabokov's late fiction with a quiet query about the term. It is in one sense synonymous with “last fictions,”as we now speak of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, although he didn't call them that. Lateness of this kind is a matter of chronological time, and may imply an achieved maturity, a sense of autumn. The Oxford English Dictionary gives “flowering or ripening at an advanced season of the year” among its meanings. But with Nabokov no matter of time is only a matter of time, and lateness in the work of distinguished artists often has another, qualitative meaning, far from negative but indicating, nonetheless, a certain quirkiness, hinting not merely at maturity but also at something beyond maturity. Since all of Nabokov's work is quirky, we shall have to show, if we wish to pursue this thought, that the quirkiness itself changes its color or its tone or its intensity in the late novels, and that is what I shall try to do in this essay.

Of the nine novels that Nabokov wrote in Russian, the last three - Despair (Otchaianie), Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kazn), and The Gift (Dar) - are arguably his finest. In them Nabokov explores the nature of the creative spirit and the relationship between artists and the subjects that inspire them. Despair offers a cautionary tale of creative solipsism with its depiction of a self-proclaimed artistic genius who shows little regard for the autonomy of the people whose lives he subsumes into his creative fantasy. Invitation to a Beheading presents the contrary position as Nabokov focuses on an imaginative individual who must work up the courage to trust his own creative vision and end his fealty to the conformist pressures of the surrounding society. The Gift provides the most sweeping portrait of the artistic personality, and it discloses in exquisite detail the transformative powers of a finely honed creative consciousness. What is more, each of these novels tackles its subject in a unique way. The resulting triptych testifies to the extraordinary range of Vladimir Nabokov's own imagination.