SOURCE: "The Boom Novel and the Cold War in Latin America," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, Autumn, 1992, pp. 771-84.

[In the following essay, Larson questions whether or not there is a correlation between global cultural, intellectual, and political anti-communism and the "canonization of Latin American modernism."]

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 modernism and modernity were consubstantial categories, that modernism was somehow already precontained in the raw and immediate experience of contemporary life. To defend, 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 existence of a modernist "politics." But even supposing one did, such a "politics" tended to be viewed as likewise consubstantial with "modernity" 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-formal ist 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 example, Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air), this sort of thinking must now confront the sense among intellectuals and cultural consumers generally that modernism has failed to keep its Utopian promises—and that contemporary experience may not after all be of a piece with modernist aesthetics. For some, no doubt, the same premise of consubstantiality now restates itself, mutatis mutandis, as the relationship of postmodernism 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 pertinence 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 unsuspected 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 Lukács of the early 1950s [see, inter alia, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism and the epilogue to The Destruction of Reason]). But the—as one might put it—one-two punch of Cold War thinking itself, together with the generally promodernist stance of the New Left, had until recently kept this question 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 image of itself as the guardian of aesthetic culture. A similarly political connection is uncovered in Lawrence H. Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputation. 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 campaign 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 proletarian 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, Josephine Herbst, Mike Gold, Richard Wright, and others, not only by Left-wing but by more "mainstream" critics as well, was generally enthusiastic. 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 as 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, including my own, the creed of a modernist consubstantiality with contemporary life—of 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-Communism into a virtual touch-stone not only for political but for virtually all cultural practice as well, and the canonization of Latin American modernism, 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 cognate—modernismo—refers to a literary movement appearing in Spanish America at roughly the turn of the century, mainly in poetry, and with affinities for French symbolism and Parnassianism. 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 modernism directly assimilable to some metropolitan, or would-be global modernist 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 body of literature that, while not quite outside the orbit of canonical modernism, 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 modernism in its penchant for formal experiments, also differed from it by virtue 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 Guimarães 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 latter—comprising works by, inter alia, Fuentes, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez—fully merits the modernist 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 Cortázar, without a Rulfo or Asturias, no García Márquez, 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 García Márquez, 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-àvis 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 to North American developments appears much more problematic. Certainly, the standard theories of the "boom" would not appear to support such a view. These theories can, very schematically, be classified as belonging to three different types. The first, and probably still the most commonly 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 authenticity. Cortázar, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa all made notorious pronouncements 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 immanent 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, Guimarães 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 advocate 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 preexisting demand. That is, Rama adopts what might be called the vulgar sociological standpoint, according to which phenomena such as market trends, demographic shifts and changing consumption 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 Mejía-Duque, for example, concedes 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, particularly after the Padilla affair of 1971,³ many of the "boom" authors withdrew their initial support of the revolution demonstrates the "constitutive ambiguity" of the politics of the "boom" but does not negate the objective historical connection. The "boom" is, in Mejía-Duque's words, "something exterior to [the] revolution, but not foreign to it" (86, my translation). More recently Gerald Martin has taken a similar position, 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 novels—created 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 Fernández Retamar's Calibán—that indict the "boom" novelists with being too "exterior" 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, 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 revolution 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 incisive and lucid essay "Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas en la década 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 antiimperialist stance of the "boom" authors and the fact that the same authors "elaborate a literature that scarcely alludes to the dramatic conjuncture 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 collectively 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 predominantly the work of the pathologicaldetermininist view of history embodied in naturalism—a view which, given the political effervescence of the 1960s, could only seem perversely out of date. But the "boom," in Halperín's account, answers naturalism not with a deeper historical realism but rather with an adoption of "new techniques," that is, with modernism. This, in the politically charged atmosphere 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 potency—this 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 García Márquez 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 Perón], 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).

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 engagé. Why? Perhaps because, putting it bluntly, the Latin American "boom" modernist is an anti-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 America (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 tradition—stretching, 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" itself—that 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 one—there operates much the same reduction of human agencies in Latin America to the irresistible 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 Halperín's own rather tragic view of Latin America's literary destiny, however, is that the moment of authentic, historical realism is missing. While in Halperín's view, the Latin American social sciences do effect a rupture with naturalist historicism—for which he above all thanks the path-breaking work of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui—no such breakthrough occurs in literature. If the "boom" enacts a "revolution," it remains, for Halperin, a "revolución Boba"—a "fool's revolution," that "solves" the basic difficulty by resolutely turning its back on it (164).

But is the literary breakthrough into a modern historical realism in fact an unrealized moment in Latin America? Here I think that Halperín, 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 here—the 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 sertões. 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, Guimarães Rosa's Grande sertão: 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 attributable in turn to a whole series of twentieth-century authors as well, among them Lima Barreto, Rachel de Quierós, 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 particular—namely, 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 firn 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 especially his more orthodox socialist realist novels (Seara vermelha, and the urban trilogy Os subterrâneos 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 subsequently 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 ultimately make possible the great achievement of a work such as Terras do sem fim, together with its sequel in the "cacao cycle," São Jorge de Ilhéus: the fully epical portrayal of Brazil's evolution, out of a state of semifeudal land tenure and rural clientelism (the Brazilian term is coronelismo) 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 hypermodern Latin America—emerges 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 dynamic—as, in the final analysis, the cumulative product of human agencies.

This fact alone makes Amado an interesting foil to the various versions 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 Bahía 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 subterrâneos 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" 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 authority 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 probably best known: Gabriela, cravo e canela. Set, like the earlier "cacao cycle" in the southern Bahian port of Ilhéus, 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" liaison—from premarital to marital and finally to postmarital—Amado weaves the narration of the changing sexual and gender mores of Ilhéus as it gradually undergoes the transition (previously portrayed in Terras do sem fim and São Jorge de Ilhéus) 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 wife—the 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 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 fore-ground by the theme that is to characterize Amado's fiction from 1958 on: the exotic, eroticized piquancy of Bahía'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 excluded 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 Graça 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 Letters—a seat for which, in a historical first, he is the sole and uncontested candidate. Sales of Gabriela are unprecedented for a Brazilian work of fiction. Critics, from the Catholic conservative Tristão de Athayde to the existentialist 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 politicians, 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 récit." 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, García Márquez's Autumn of the Patriarch. There is no Joycean or Faulknerian imprint here. It would perhaps even require some imagination 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 Cortázar something more in the nature of a horizon of ideologically unquestioned assumptions. The budding "boom" novelist is more likely an Existentialist—via readings of Sartre and Camus—than a militant Leninist. But if the Cuban revolution results in a sudden, seemingly Leftwing inflection within the overall rightward evolution, then its effect, it seems to me, is largely superficial 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 militant version of a Latin American nationalism that just as easily supports a Perón or an Omar Torrijos as it does a Fidel.

The value of rereading the "boom" through a technically extracanonical 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" text—but also within the context of the Amadian historical realism with which it breaks—the myth of essence, or what we have also termed the myth of modernism itself as consubstantial with a raw, prepoliticai 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.

¹ The classic argument for "magical realism" is to be found in Alejo Carpentier's original, 1949 prologue to his novel, El reino de este mundo.

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

³ A bitter controversy surrounding the jailing of poet Heberto Padilla by the Cuban government for purportedly subversive activities.

⁴ For much of the information in what follows I rely on Wagner's immensely useful study, Jorge Amado: Politica e Literatura.

⁵ Wagner 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 superficial, and the workers come to occupy a very remote and secondary plane" (249, my translation). Gorender agrees that in Gabriela Amado transcends some of the schematism of Os subterrâneos da liberdade, but not without paying the price of a political shift to the right.

Amado, Jorge. Gabriela, cravo e canela. Lisbon: Publicações Europa-America, 1970.

——. São Jorge de llhéus. Lisbon: Publicações Europa-America, 1970.

——. Os subterrâneos da liberdade. Lisbon: Publicações Europa-America, 1976.

——. Terras do sem fim. São Paulo: Livraria Martíns, 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 Goldhammer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Halperin Donghi, Tulio. "Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas en la década del sesenta." Viñas 147-164.

Lukács, Georg. The Destruction of Reason. Trans. Peter Palmer. London: Merlin, 1980.

Martín, Gerald. Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1989.

Mejía-Duque, Jaime. Narrativa y neocoloniaje en América Latina. Bogotá: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1977.

Murphy, James. The Proletarian Moment. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

Rama, Angel. "El 'boom' en perspectiva." Viñas 51-84.

Retamar, Fernández. Calibán. 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.

Viñas, David, et al., eds. Másallá del boom: Literatura y mercado. Mexico City: Marcha Editores, 1981.

Wagner Berno de Almeida, Alfredo. Jorge Amado: Politica e Literatura. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Campus, 1979.