SOURCE: "Sarduy, the Boom, and the Post-Boom," in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 15, No. 29, January-June, 1987, pp. 57-72.

[In the following essay, González Echevarría focuses on Maitreya and Colibrí and examines the self-reflective, autobiographical character of Sarduy's writings.]

In his recent books, Sarduy loses himself in the extravagance of his previous works, in the gallery of mirrors that reflects back the texts already written. He again performs a rigorous analysis of the Latin American tradition within which he creates his work and to which he now adds a reflection about his own life as a writer. What does being a Latin American writer mean? How can one create a work as heterodox as his from within a cultural tradition in which the structures of power and authority are so rigid? What is the relationship between power and writing, between authority and literary discourse? Where does Sarduy situate himself with respect to modernity and post-modernity, and what does this position reveal about the Latin American narrative today? These are the questions raised by Sarduy's latest works, but not, of course, in the abstract language used here. On the contrary, if something is evident in the most recent ground covered by Sarduy, if something is visible in the path he takes in the eighties, it is a concretely autobiographical inclination. Now, Sarduy returns to America not by way of the Orient; rather, the New World itself is the one visited, as much literally as literarily: not Nepal or New Delhi, but Camagüey or Caracas, San Juan or Mexico City; not Tibet, but the South American Jungle.

Sarduy visited Caracas in the early 1980s for a conference concurrent with the presentation of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which is awarded every four years to Latin American writers for a novel published during that period. The prize has been won by Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among many others. This was one of Sarduy's many visits to Latin America in the past few years. The encounter with South America, and with Caracas in particular, was of singular importance. In Caracas Sarduy approached the Latin America of Doña Bárbara (1929) and The Lost Steps (1953). For Caracas is not only Rómulo Gallego's city, but Alejo Carpentier's as well. It was in the Venezuelan capital that Carpentier wrote some of his most important works between 1945 and 1959, most especially The Lost Steps, that critical summa of Spanish American literature that originated in part from the author's experience of the Venezuelan jungle. For Carpentier, Venezuela constituted a synthesis of what is American. Sarduy will arrive at the same insight through the novel of his compatriot and master.

In Caracas Sarduy also met with members of the Cuban delegation to the conference, who had meant a great deal to him early in his career, writers such as Cintio Vitier and Fina García Murruz, survivors of the "Orígenes" Group and close associates of José Lezama Lima, who had just died. Sarduy also met with Caribbean writers who admired him and whom he has influenced, such as the Puerto Rican Luis Rafael Sánchez. The trip to Caracas contributed to the recovery of the most traditional Latin American theme, whose center is nature and whose obsessive landscape is the jungle. Colibrí ["Hummingbird," 1984] is the product of that recovery. This textual journey to the jungle in quest of the origins of a Latin American literary tradition shapes itself to that of the protagonist in The Lost Steps, searching for roots and for the inspiration to create. Carpentier published his great novel at the age of forty-nine; Sarduy was forty-eight when Colibrí appeared.

The reflective nature of Carpentier's novel, which was based on a poignant introspection by the author in which life and work are fused and confused, has its counterpart in all of Sarduy's recent texts. Sarduy's literary journey up to the 1980s has attained sufficient literary and historical density to act as an unavoidable facticity, a facticity that is imposed as rereading and as origin of whatever followed. The clearest sign of this process is La simulación ["Simulation"], a book of essays published precisely in Caracas (1982). From the very first page it is clear that one of La simulación's objects of speculation is Sarduy's own life. The best example of this self-reflection, however, is Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado ["A Fleeting and Disguised Witness," 1985], a surprising book of poetry, above all because of the traditional nature of its versification: these poems are sonnets and ten-syllable décimas with clear Gongoristic and Quevedian echoes. Autobiographical mode and submission to traditional forms are, jointly, the most visible marks of Sarduy's texts in these years.

The return to conventional literary forms as much in Colibrí as in Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado reflects a historical phenomenon of undeniable impact: the dispersion of the Tel Quel group, and with it a certain retreat on the theoretical and experimental front. Undoubtedly, the deaths of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan contributed to this withdrawal. But theoretical fatigue had made itself increasingly felt in their works, especially in Barthes', which, like Sarduy's, whose work was very probably influenced by Sarduy, turned gradually to autobiographical and aesthetic concerns. The later Barthes frees himself from the neutral, scientific tone of his semiotic phase in order to produce a self-reflection marked thematically and formally by eroticism. The turn toward the literary perhaps is a recognition that theory, as important as it was, had been the least compelling aspect of the work of the maîtres penseurs of French criticism; that Foucault's obsessions with those excluded from society (prisoners, sexual perverts), Lacan's Joycean style (neologisms, play on words, a certain linguistic liturgy), always averse to scientific metalanguage, and Barthes' fixing gaze (of the body, of the contour of objects and spectacles), were the most lasting and pertinent literary elements produced by the group. All of this is visible in Sarduy not merely as the "influence" of French thought in his works, but as an integral part of Sarduy's own project. In many ways, the transformations of the Parisian clique represent a short slide toward Sarduy, since it had been Sarduy, more than anyone else, who had systematically applied Tel Quel theory to actual literary products.

The exhaustion of theory leads to a recovery of conventional forms and themes—to the primacy of plot in Colibrí, to the jungle, and to the rigorous conventional metrics of Un testigo fugazy disfrazado. But it also consists—once again, although in a very different manner—of a return to the beginning, to origins. Not a return to a unique origin, void and bare, but rather to a formed origin; that is to say, to the forms prior to the demolition by telquelian experiments, to the forms bequeathed by tradition, by power and authority. To the writer who abandons his literary youth, his passion for the new, traditional form is a discipline. Already a part of tradition, Sarduy is forced to fathom, as in Maitreya (1977), the importance of the works of the masters as well as his own place within tradition. This transition and self-reflection figure prominently in Colibrí.

In the same way that Escrito sobre un cuerpo (Written on a Body, 1969) and Barroco ["Baroque," 1974] reflected upon the themes of former stages in Sarduy's career, La simulación dramatizes those of the most recent phase. I say dramatizes because, as in previous essays, Sarduy refuses to generate a metalanguage that pretends to escape literary discourse. Thus, as in Escrito sobre un cuerpo, characters of Sarduy's own fiction appear in La simulación, and an entire scene from Maitreya is inserted. Furthermore, Sarduy includes in La simulación vignettes of his own life that reflect the themes of the book; as in Roland Barthes par lui même, Sarduy is the principal object of analysis in La simulación because the book wishes to isolate the elements that make his work peculiarly his. La simulación seeks the Sarduy in Sarduy. Pretense, simulation, are offered as the distinguishing marks of this work and as that which motivates every individual, above all the artist. The central thesis of the book is that there is a "feigning (im)pulse" implicit in the death wish whose source is biological. That which is "natural"—also in the sense of "normal"—is therefore already simulated. In other words, we suppose with automatic Platonism that the copy is weak, secondary, parasitic, while the model is the original, that which is strong and natural. Sarduy inverts this conceptual habit: the copy is the strongest because it is what generates movement, what awakens the subversive capacity of the model. The model only survives in the copy. According to Sarduy, this dissimulating impulse is manifested in what he calls the aggression of the copy against the original. The transvestite outdoes what women in "femininity," his "makeup" makes her most violent and lethal characteristics stand out. The excess of the copy is the supplement; the ontic is always the addition, which adds, subtracting from the original. To be is to (un)assemble, to evade power by camouflaging the body in order to mimic the forms of power, so that they may be pointed back—now as subversive and lethal weapons—at power itself. It is here (in Colibrí) that American nature will come into play. Nature, with its mimetic exuberance, motivates the process of inflating the copy, or the copiousness of the copy (as is evident in Maitreya, especially in the obese, Botero-like characters).

Sarduy bases these assertions on statistical studies that "prove" that the mimetic activity of certain butterflies, which before was believed to be a form of defensive camouflage, is totally useless; hence it may simply be the product of a desire to disappear, to die. To die is to die. Pure excess. Excess as issuing from a biological impulse. By pretending, which is the only way to be, transvestites play with death. In this theory of Sarduy's there is, curiously enough, an echo of a certain fin de siecle vitalism which had a great influence on Ortega y Gasset's work, especially on his theories about the sportive character of human culture—culture is that which is not a reaction to material necessities; it is that which is in excess of them. There is a notable difference, however, that at the level of the history of ideas we would have to attribute not to Ortega y Gasset but rather to Heidegger and Bataille, since here excess is at once being and an impulse towards death, being towards death. This self-annihilating character lends an appearance of mortal masquerade to Sarduy's version of American art (and of the American artists), which links it to the Baroque. Evidently Sarduy's speculation about secondariness, about the primacy of the copy, about the persistence of the model in the copy, has to do with American art and American being in general: American art is transvestism, a Baroque spectacle. That which is American would then no longer be merely secondary. American is that which is by being secondary. Upon copying that which is European, in the gesture of incorporating and visibly assimilating European forms, American art and being constitute themselves not as copies, but as the only life that the original can actually have. The vignettes based on Sarduy's life, especially the first one, bring these considerations to the most concrete level possible.

In this vignette Sarduy narrates a story from his childhood, which takes place in a Camagüey described in Lezama Lima's terms, with shades of Amelia Peláez. It is Carnival time. Sarduy and his father put on costumes. The father, wrapped up in a sheet, is dressed as a ghost, the boy as a woman. The pair could not be more suggestive. By dressing as a woman the boy abolishes any resemblance to the father, denying him in the most subversive way possible within the Spanish American context. The father, in turn, has transformed himself into an image of death. The vignette is a minute Baroque allegory of the central themes in La simulación. The carnivalesque joke reveals a profound stratum of culture in the act of concealing itself. That stratum of culture is at odds with official ideology. Pretense, disguise, paradoxically make the truth, or at least its image, break forth. The model, form, that which is traditional, surrenders its movements, its breath, to the copy, which lives off it by means of a kind of parasitism. The model, vacated, is now the image of death, a fixed form. By coming into the play of the book disguised as himself, Sarduy as author assumes the risk of his theory. Clearly, to dress up as yourself is also a form of simulation, perhaps the most effective. There is no exhibitionism in La simulación; nor is there reticence or prudishness as in similar essays by the major writers of the tradition, for example, Borges, Fuentes, Paz, or Lezama Lima himself.

Of all the transgressions against the Latin American literary tradition in the last few years, none is as radical as the one perpetrated in Colibrí. In his most recent novel, Sarduy abandons the visibly Cuban themes of his previous work in order to focus on the central theme of Latin American literature: the relationship between the American landscape and the culture of the New World. Ever since the chroniclers of the Indies, ever since the great travel-books of the nineteenth century and Sarmiento's Facundo, Bello's Silvas americanas, Neruda's General Song and Carpentier's The Lost Steps, Latin American nature, with its singularity and exuberance, has been the emblem of what is new, different—of what is unusual. How to think of the American landscape? What is its place in natural history? Writing America, telling its history, must be the account of that unusualness, as much in Fernández de Oviedo, who thinks from the point of view of fixed neo-Scholastic schemes, as in Hegel, who already thinks of the natural world as history, even though he vacillates over exactly where to place American nature—either at the beginning or at the end of history. The theme of nature has given American literature the mark of newness and of modernity, and by accumulation, that of stability and facticity; the American tradition is the tradition of what is new. This paradox is the origin of Colibrí.

In Colibrí Sarduy abandons the figurative geography of his previous novels—Cuba/the East—to unfold a map made up of the clichés of the Latin American novel of the jungle. It is a symbolic map like the ones in The Lost Steps and One Hundred Years of Solitude: the river, the estuary, the jungle, the cove, the clearing in the forest, and as contrast, the city. In this literary cartography Sarduy dismantles the most elementary components, the foundations of Latin American culture, revealing its most profound secret, where sex and being, language and social praxis are intertwined. The novel of the jungle constitutes the epic stratum of Latin American literature, that which relates the origin and evolution of the founding characters and their values; the epic current in Latin American narrative, as in The Lost Steps (Santa Mónica de los Venados) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (Macondo), the history of the creation of cities, of the birth of the heroes who carried it out. The novel of the jungle, including Neruda's General Song, narrates the marriage of American man to the virgin nature of the Continent and shows how Latin American culture emerges from their amorous struggle. On his journey to the jungle the Latin American writer finds himself and encounters those epic origins, inasmuch as the theme of nature legitimizes him as part of tradition. This is the process narrated in The Lost Steps and taken up again in Colibrí: the origin of tradition, the origin of the authorial figure, both being basic components of the authority on which literature as a Latin American institution is founded.

Colibrí, and we can immediately perceive the nature and breadth of the transgression, is a blend of gay epic and pastoral, revolving around the problematic passage from adolescence to maturity; that is to say, the moment in which the individual, acculturated (subjected to a code of laws, to the Other), begins to become a part of society. It is a transition parallel to that from being a young writer to one who is part of the canon. Colibrí's is a pre-heroic world, a world that exists before José Arcadio Buendía marries and founds Macondo. Of course, Colibrí takes apart the myths that sustain the gay world as well. The pastoral is another version of America's utopia, while the epic is the creation of a hero who bases his power on the authoritative submission of the Other. In short, the hero is a version of the antecedents of the Latin American dictator who ends up being a perversion of his previous literary renderings.

This focus on the transition from adolescense to maturity reflects a process of squaring accounts in Sarduy's work; his passing from the position of a young writer, who practices novelty like terrorism was an emblem of himself, to the posture of a mature writer, who has already consolidated a position and whose novelty has been converted into a recognizable discourse, into a kind of facticity. With Colibrí Sarduy's literary adolesence ends; with this book he shakes off the mask of the portrait of the artist as a young man. Cuba as a theme has been exhausted in Maitreya, and the debt to Lezama Lima seems to have been settled with that hallucinating biography of Luis Leng. Cobra had left behind the experiments most clearly marked by the theories of Tel Quel. This does not mean that there are no traces of these two themes, but they appear as part of that facticity that is a signature of Sarduy's own style. Colibrí boasts not only figures of what is Spanish American, but also figures already thought of as properly Sarduian.

This self-reflection is announced in the first sentence of the novel: "He danced between two mirrors, naked, behind the bar." The two mirrors infinitely multiply the protagonist's image; given the identification of the author with the protagonist, nakedness projects self analysis. In fact, Sarduy's images in the novel are multiple, even though derived, above all, from two figures: the protagonist and the narrator. These two figures, of course, are protean. The narrator speaks at times in a masculine voice and at others in a feminine one. Sometimes the protagonist seems to be only the projection of the other characters' desires. In any case, the vicissitudes of both reflect known elements in Sarduy's biography, as is the case in La simulación. The text of Colibrí is like a gallery of mirrors in which images of the author are reflected and multiply, dissolving the original. We do not know, of course, who Sarduy really is, except the exuberant proliferation of his figures, as elusive as the hummingbird itself and as much a product of the illusion of movement that this bird projects. Clearly, it is not only this narcissistic obsession that controls the text; various allegorical strata of signification that include American themes related to nature are added to it.

The action in Colibrí begins in a place typical of Sarduian fiction: an emporium close to a great river, where handsome young men engage in fake, wrestling matches for the pleasure of the nouveau riche and military brass addicted to violence and discipline. As at the end of Maitreya, we are in the inflationary world of petro-dollars and drug trafficking, the world of luxury and waste, of the supplementary. La Casona is situated at the edge of the jungle and is presided over by La Regenta (also La Canosa, etc.), a madam whose original gender is unknown. Given to imperious gestures and unappealable commands, La Regenta (provisional queen?) governs the joint with an iron fist, assisted by a dwarf who acts as referee in the fixed combats and a series of decorators and cooks who make up the place. The Madam and her emporium have their antecedents in Rivera's The Vortex (1924) and Vargas Llosa's The Green House (1965); in the myth of the jungle, and that of El Dorado, alluded through the protagonist in Carpentier's The Lost Steps.

Colibrí arrives at this place from the jungle. He is young, extremely beautiful, his hair is blond, almost white. His ancestry is unknown. Like all Sarduian characters, he seems to have been born ad hoc for fiction. They name him Colibrí (hummingbird) because of the posture of flight that he assumes as he jumps over the fence and because of his agility as a wrestler. Colibrí's first match is against an obese Japanese sumo wrestler, who is unable to seize him and in his effort to do so hits his head against the back wall, on which there is a mural depicting a winter scene. Colibrí becomes the hero of the joint, valued and sought after by the "whales" (the "cetaceans", etc.), that is, the wealthy clients who frequent the spot. But the Madam has fallen in love with him, and Colibrí flees to the jungle pursued by her agents. In the jungle he comes across the Japanese wrestler, and they first become friends, then lovers. The hunters find them, and they are separated in their flight. Colibrí hides in the capital, in another joint where he works in the painting of "tamed fleas." There the Regenta's men find him again, he fights anew with the Fat Jap and with the giant, metamorphosed into a tall nun who attacks him with a knife which has a crucifix for a handle (an homage to Buñuel). But Colibrí manages to escape once more, returning to the jungle on a trip resembling that of the narrator-protagonist of The Lost Steps. In the deep of the jungle he again encounters his persecutors—they can be found at the origin, the source that is not pure, that also contains violence. They return Colibrí to La Casona, adoring him now as though he were a deity. Everyone returns to the Emporium, which has become an asylum for benign old lunatics. Colibrí, who has begun to show a capacity for leadership, burns the place down, only to reconstruct it, requesting that youths be brought in to liven up the joint as before. The circular nature of the story is evident. In the end, Colibrí replaces La Regenta, and in this way, retrospectively, reveals her origin.

Can Sarduy's work be seen as a paradigm of the most recent Latin American novel, of that body of narrative that some have already called the post-Boom? Prudence counsels us to respond that it is too soon to establish such demarcations, that the present is difficult, if not impossible, to place historically. If the Boom exists, it was due to cultural, political, and economic factors that made it such that a group of novelists was recognized as somewhat homogenous, despite the differences in their ages and backgrounds. Such conditions do not exist today. What does indeed continue, however, is an enormous vitality in Latin American fiction, with the writers of the Boom (except Cortázar, of course) and others peripheral to the phenomenon who have continued writing with great imaginative energy and success. Remarkable works keep coming from, among the major figures, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso and Augusto Roa Bastos, and from among the younger contingent (the group to which Sarduy belongs due to his age)—Manuel Puig, Miguel Barnet, and Reynaldo Arenas. If there is a post-Boom, it must include some of the works by each of these writers, since all work during the same time and under similar conditions. Clearly, some of the novels of the older group continue to repeat certain characteristics of the novels of the Boom, especially those by Vargas Llosa and Fuentes. If we think of the post-Boom as consisting of some of the books produced by the Boom's protagonists after the famous novels that consecrated them, and these in addition to those written by the younger group, perhaps then we could discern some common characteristics to attempt a very provisional description of the period. Let us venture some general ideas, taking Sarduy as a starting point but without pretending to turn him into a paradigm. But beforehand, and in order to see the phenomenon of the post-Boom in a context that clarifies it somewhat, let us consider the characteristic of a movement undoubtedly linked to the post-Boom: post-Modernism, or postmodern literature. We will approach post-Modernism through the proposals of the North American novelist John Barth and the French theorist Jean-François Lyotard.

In a necessarily autobiographical essay [John Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment," in his The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction, 1984], since he has been considered one of the foremost postmodern writers, Barth meditates on the distinction between moderns and post-moderns. First, he affirms something that must be kept in mind when talking about the post-Boom; post-Modernism is necessarily epigonic, as much a continuation as a rupture, and in no way can it be though of as a negation of Modernism. Barth includes T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, André Gide, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Miguel de Unamuno and Virginia Woolf among the great modern writers. Postmodern writers (in addition to himself, included with due skepticism), and the North Americans William Gass, John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Outside the United States Barth says that some include Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, the later Nabokov, the authors of the nouveau roman, Michel Butor, the writers of the Tel Quel group, the Englishman John Fowles, and the "expatriate Argentine Julio Cortázar." In addition, Barth proclaims that he will not associate himself with any literary group in which Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Italian semi-expatriate Italo Calvino are not included. As we shall see, Barth considers these two writers, especially the first, to be the best exponents of postmodern literature. It should be evident that, for our purposes, Barth's list is somewhat confusing, if it places Borges, García Márquez, and Cortázar in the same category, even though it must be clarified that he speaks of including just the North American writers, García Márquez and Calvino. The other names have been frequently mentioned by critics.

In summarizing the works of such North American critics as Robert Alter and Gerald Graff, Barth provides several characteristics of modern literature. It is principally a criticism of last century's bourgeois social order and the vision of the world that it promoted. The central artistic recourse therefore consisted of deliberately inverting the conventions of bourgeois realism by such tactics as the substitution of the mythical method for realism, and the manipulation of parallelism between contemporaneity and antiquity. Echoing Graff, Barth alludes here to what Eliot said with respect to Joyce's Ulysses. Other recourses were "the radical disruption of the linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause-and-effect 'development' thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical 'meaning' of literary action." To this he adds "the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at the naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the objective social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie." On his part, Barth adds two elements to this list: (1) "the modernists' insistence, borrowed from their romantic forebears, on the special, usually alienated role of the artist in his society, or outside of it: James Joyce's priestly, self-exiled artist-hero; Thomas Mann's artist as charlatan, or mountebank; Franz Kafka's artist as anorexic, or bug;" (2) "the modernists' foregrounding of language technique as opposed to straightforward traditional 'content.'" According to Barth, modern works are also difficult, creating the need for professors, or a "priestly industry of explicators, annotators, allusion-chasers, to mediate between the text and the reader." Postmodern narrative, according to the professors read by Barth,

merely emphasizes the "performing" self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of modernism, in a spirit of cultural subversiveness and anarchy. With varying results, they maintain, postmodernist writers write a fiction that is more and more about itself and its processes, less and less about objective reality and life in the world. For Gerald Graff, too, postmodern fiction simply carries to its logical and questionable extremes the anti-rationalist, anti-realist, anti-bourgeois program of modernism, but with neither a solid adversary (the bourgeois having now everywhere co-opted the trappings of modernism and turned its defiant principles into mass-media kitsch) nor solid mornings in the quotidian realism it defines itself against.

As can be inferred from his tone, Barth is not completely convinced by this description of postmodernism, which if accurate would make "postmodernist writing […] indeed a kind a pallid, last-ditch decadence, of no more than minor symptomatic interest." For Barth "[t]he proper program for postmodernism is neither a mere extension of the modernist program as described above, nor a mere intensification of certain aspects of modernism, nor on the contrary a whole-sale subversion or repudiation of either modernism or what I am calling premodernism—'traditional' bourgeois realism." Barth is not overly explicit about the details of his program. He puts most of his emphasis on the need that postmodern works be made accessible to a greater number of readers, since the novelties of modernity "are by now more or less debased common currency," and because "we really don't need more Finnegan's Wakes or Pisan Cantos, each with its staff of tenured professors to explain it to us." And, above all, the postmodern narrative should tell a story. His preferred examples are Italo Calvino (Cosmicomics) and García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude). The latter is "an exemplary postmodernist and a master of the storyteller's art."

I don't believe that Barth's proposed and discussed schemes are immediately applicable to Latin American narrative, but they do seem to be adaptable in an instructive way. There is no doubt in my mind that what Barth and his sources call modern literature corresponds to the novelistic trend of the Boom, in particular Cortázar's Hopscotch (not the stories, which perhaps would be postmodern), and three novels profoundly marked by Joyce, Faulkner, and poetry: The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), The Obscene Bird of Night (1979), and Three Trapped Tigers (1967). The predominant elements in these novels are breakdowns of the plot, an emphasis on language and on stream of consciousness, allusiveness, irony, the self-reflection that inquires as to what literature is. They also feature notions of the artist as an alienated, priestly, sickly being—Horacio, Cabrera Infante's trapped tigers, Estrella, Morelli. Bourgeois rationalism is mocked in these novels, and, in a subjectivism sometimes aided by drugs, a more profound level of self-knowledge is sought after, along with an understanding of culture as a superior value which invalidates the false and alienating manifestations of the post-Industrial society. As such, we would of course have to admit that there is a delay on the part of Latin American literature, since it arrives at the Modern, at least in narrative, at a moment when the postmodern already predominates in North America and in Europe. It would be better, however, to say that Latin American literature is simply following the beat of another drummer rather than experiencing a delay. But in any case, it seems to me plausible to say that the Modern is equivalent to the Boom, and therefore postmodern is equivalent to the post-Boom.

Now, what version of the postmodern is applicable to the post-Boom, and in particular to Sarduy? The professorial one or Barth's? I don't believe them to be antithetical but complementary. What is crucial is the return to storytelling, to narrativity. I believe that the program of intensification of Modernism's experiments does indeed lead to a narrative that increasingly centers around itself and its processes, but contrary to what was initially thought, this leads to the realization that this kind of writing also produces narrative, not metadiscourse or knowledge. It seems to me that this is what occurs in One Hundred Years of Solitude as much as in the most recent works by Sarduy. What is now irretrievable is the notion that a metadiscourse exists, that a narrative matrix "opens itself," and in doing so makes possible a profound understanding of literature or the author. As far as this is concerned, narrative, including the Latin American post-Boom narrative, coincides with the description of knowledge in the postmodern era made by Lyotard, who insists on the preeminence of stories, of the narrative in all forms of knowledge [Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur te savior, 1979]. The stories are local matrices of knowledge not connected with superior matrices that explain either the stories or the matrices. Narrative processes indeed might not be the whole story of real life, but surely they are part of it. What postmodern narrative sets out to do is to abolish the nostalgia for totalization. The novel of the Boom aspired to be total, and even if it failed and made a spectacle of this failure, the fact remains that the possibility of totalization was an important factor.

I believe we can now return to Sarduy, to the novel of the post-Boom, and to the categories I had promised above.

Apotheosis of narrativity. The works of the Boom, in accordance with what we have just pointed out, and Hopscotch in particular, inhibited the plot, at times subjecting it to a pulverization that did not allow even the most tenacious reader to recognize the thread of the story. In Sarduy this stage corresponds to From Cuba with a Song (1972) and to Cobra. Ever since Maitreya there has been a return of the plot, of the story, as a backbone element of the text. The same can be observed in Cabrera Infante, if we compare Three Trapped Tigers to Infante's Inferno. In the former there are various narrative threads that may or may not interweave, while in the latter there is a linear development. The testimonial novels of Barnet and the works by Puig never practiced the kind of narrative dispersal that we find in many of the works of the Boom. Now, as we have seen in Colibrí, this return to storytelling does not in any way mean that there is a return to the traditional novel. The distinguishing element between traditional and post-Boom narrative lies in the understanding of plot and how it is put together in these post-Boom works. It is a matter of a difference in narrative discourse. In the traditional novel the narrative line was guaranteed by the centralizing presence of an authorial voice that carried the story from one event to another, explaining how the different parts were interwined and making the whole story relate or reflect a series of social values, the most important being the concept of time and the model of history. The narrator's voice assures us of why what happens happens. In the novels of the Boom the authorial voice is fragmented but does not lose its authority, since the author's figures always embody literary values that suppose a possible prior or future unity. The chronicler in Terra Nostra is Cervantes; in Hopscotch Morelli is a theorist of the novel; furthermore, this narrative presupposes a unity provided by language itself and its capacity to establish meaningful ties independent of the whole story, as in poetry. In the recent Latin American novel the concatenation of incidents is produced independently of any metadiscourse, of any global category that might posit a meaningful order, including language. When the author appears in the work, as in The War of the End of the World, that symphony of narrativity, he does so as one more fictional character without superior powers (he is a mere journalist, somewhat short-sighted in addition). When he appears in Colibrí, it is as a painter of "tamed fleas." Furthermore, the story, the succession, and linking of incidents in these novels is considered independent of the narrator, as we saw in Colibrí; the story is more important than language or the narrator.

Absence of metadiscourse. The novels of the Boom, even the most audacious, contain a critical, literary, political, or cultural metadiscourse. Hopscotch, for example, displays its own literary theory explicitly formulated in the "Table of Instructions" and in fragments of "Morelliana." In addition, Hopscotch is still marked by the great theme of modern Latin American literature: the search for cultural identity and the definition of Latin American culture. Oliveira searches for his identity as an Argentine; the two parts of the novel provide the dialectic of Argentine culture: Europe-America. From Cuba with a Song fragmented the theme of Cuban identity into three stories, and in Colibrí Latin American identity is reduced to a single story that posits Latin American identity as the reflection of a nature which gives it meaning over and above the story itself. Without the possibility of totalization, the novel of the post-Boom abandons the nostalgia of identity, or of culture, as a narrative matrix that might comprise it and invest it with meaning.

This elimination of metadiscourse is systematically carried out in Sarduy through the presentation of local religious systems. What Lyotard identifies at the level of the exchange of knowledge in the postmodern era is seen in Sarduy by privileging local stories understood as the only possible sum of knowledge, and therefore as an object of worship. In Colibrí this reappears, with a less specifically Third World sense to it, by the allusion to Jim Jones and the Guayana holocaust, a symbol of the outcome of modernity.

Elimination of ironic reflexivity. The mark of modernity on the works of the Boom was produced by the much talked-about novelistic reflexivity that, by including in the fiction the story of how the novel itself is written, creates an infinitely receding sequence that obliterates the frontiers between reality and fiction. The author's figure makes a spectacle of his suffering in the face of such ambiguity, so that his importance diminishes and he is even cancelled out as the source of creation and ultimate knowledge. The author is sacrificed to the laws of language or of literature that are superior to him. The bad faith of the process is clearly evident. The novel of the post-Boom does not give such a chance for self-immolation to the author, who not only appears as part of the fiction, but simply as one more character who does not control the events. Post-Boom narrative in no way allows for the supposition that the narrator's consciousness is superior to the story itself, and generally he does not appear as a literary figure. In Sarduy the author's figures are not only weak, but deliberately ridiculous, as with the pot-smoking director of the Shanghai, in From Cuba with a Song, or Colibrí, who is a painter of tamed fleas. Horacio, Melquíades, and even the characters of Three Trapped Tigers appear freighted with literature. Sarduy's work parodies the reflexivity of the novel of the Boom that grounds itself in the almighty figure of the author, a projection of romantic irony.

Superficiality. There is a deliberate superficiality in the novels of the post-Boom. Neither the language with its twists and turns, nor the characters, nor the author's figure, promise depth or profound understanding. All is color, narrativity, action. This is observed in a great absence in Sarduy: stream of consciousness. There is no attempt to represent authorial or character consciousness as prior to language, be it by means of syntactic breaks, reiterations, or any of the devices bequeathed by modernity, above all by Joyce and Faulkner. Sarduy's language, like Puig's, like Barnet's, does not break with the conventions of grammar and rhetoric. These are the formed and inhabited origins to which one returns on every journey of self-inquiry.