Historia personal del “Boom”

José Donoso’s Historia personal del “boom” presents itself as an insider’s account of the phenomenal success suddenly achieved by Latin American writers in the 1960s. Yet Donoso is never fully an insider, as he himself notes. He mentions the great Uruguayan critic Angel Rama’s pronouncement that the Boom had four fixed members about whom there was no dispute: Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes. But there seemed to be one more place open in the group, and little agreement as to who occupied it: perhaps Ernesto Sábato, perhaps Donoso himself (217). At other times, there have been other claimants and other nominees to this fifth, strangely mobile and uncertain, place in the Boom pantheon: Severo Sarduy or Augusto Roa Bastos, for instance. In this company, Donoso has a good a claim as any and better then most, not least because he was friends with many of the key players and travelled the same circuit of conferences, festivals, openings, and parties. As his wife’s own account, “El ‘boom’ doméstico,” relates, there was even a time when their families, living in Spain and France, would converge on Barcelona to celebrate Christmas together. But stylistic differences and (crucially) somewhat lesser commercial success prevent Donoso from being fully part of the gang. Like Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe, or Brian Epstein and George Martin, he will perhaps eternally be simply one of many contenders to the status of “fifth Beatle” alongside the fab four.

The main point Donoso makes is that the Boom was about more than marketing. Indeed, he’s keen to point out that almost all the key texts he read in the heady days of the early 1960s came to him informally, as gifts or by personal recommendation, carried in the luggage of friends who formed a network that he compares to the ancient Inca system of long-distance messengers known as “chasquis.” It was these informal exchanges, nourished by occasional events such as the 1962 Congress of Intellectuals in Concepción, Chile, that made the Boom possible. Individual writers were inspired to believe that they could go beyond the costumbrismo and social realism of their immediate forbears, whose concern was to construct or consolidate images of national identity. So while young authors were trying to overcome or bypass national borders and boundaries, they felt hamstrung by the insistence on the part of their elders that what mattered was difference and distinction, specificity and particularity. But by invoking an Inca model to explain the workings of an incipient informal cultural globalization, Donoso is also implicitly challenging standard historical narratives: the true Latin American, he suggests, prefers openness and fluidity to the hermetic closures of the nationalist tradition. If the Boom authors refused to recognize literary parentage, declaring themselves (as here) “orphans” (28), perhaps this was because the preceding generation had, in their turn, already betrayed a more hybrid and cosmopolitan version of Latin American identity.

Donoso does, however, recognize the risks that these young, ambitious authors ran. The Boom begins and ends, he suggests, with a party. The first of these takes place in Fuentes’s Mexico City house in 1965; full of “chaos and hullaballoo,” it is the culmination of a “dazzling Mexican carnival” (112). Writers mix with film stars, and the atmosphere is excitement and vivacity. But there’s also a menacing and grotesque note sounded, as “tarantulas” form that sweep even the most timid of party-goers into the mix of “bodies captive to the rhythmic rattle in which the beautiful people shed one item of clothing after another.” Donoso goes looking to introduce himself to García Márquez, only to be approached by “a man with a black moustache who asked if I was Pepe Donoso. We embraced like Latin Americans and were swallowed up by the frenzied tarantula as it passed by” (113). Five years later, Donoso tells us, the Boom finally fizzles out in another party, this time in Juan Goytisolo’s house in Barcelona, to celebrate the New Year of 1970. Here, the dancing is less chaotic and more predictable, the acting out of national stereotype: the Vargas Llosas perform to a Peruvian waltz before the García Márquezes come out to a tropical merengue. In the middle of it all, lounging on a couch, is famed Catalan literary agent Carmen Balcells: “She seemed to hold in her hands the strings to make us all dance like puppets” (124). The ecstatic frenzy of the New World has become Old World decadence and grand guignol, spontaneity replaced by stage management and exploitation.

Perhaps the writers protest too much. Several times we hear from García Márquez that “all editors are rich and all writers are poor” (72), but this quip starts to ring hollow after a while, not least from the best-selling Boom author of them all. If there was exploitation between writers and agents, publishers and publicists, it no doubt went both ways. And if the very concept of the Boom was, as Donoso argues, the creation of its detractors, product of “hysteria, envy, and paranoia” (11), those it described, and even many of those caught up in its coat-tails, still did quite well from this upsurge of interest in Latin America and its literature. For good or ill, the Boom transformed the way in which we think about the region, and continues to frame many of our (pre)conceptions and assumptions. And by “we” I mean not just outsiders–Europeans and North Americans. As Donoso himself attests, the Boom also challenged and reconfigured the ways in which Latin American writers saw their vocation and its possibilities. The Boom itself may have fizzled or dissipated all too soon, and Donoso and his wife both write with some nostalgia and regret about the brief moment that camaraderie and friendship accompanied shared literary success. But in the end neither friendship nor success were the Boom’s lasting legacy, rather a new network of associations and a new set of habits and expectations.

El lugar sin límites

For some reason, José Donoso’s work seems particularly susceptible to a reading as national allegory. Perhaps it’s the obsession with houses: Casa de campo (A House in the Country), for instance, as (in Monika Kaup’s words) “an allegorical novel about Latin American history and culture in general and Chile’s national trauma [. . .] in particular” (“Postdictatorsahip Allegory and Neobaroque Disillusionment” 92). Likewise, then, in her introduction to El lugar sin límites (translated into English as Hell Has No Limits), Selena Millares argues that Donoso is “a man of houses” and that “the house encapsulates and represents an entire society and the history that underpins it, just like a cell speaks of the human organism to which it belongs” (74). But the biological metaphor is misleading: it is less the cell itself than its DNA that tells us about the person of which it is a part, and it tells us little if anything about that person’s history. Rather, houses are only like cells in so far as they are part of a larger and more complex assemblage, and in that they may well be affected by changes in the broader environment, if perhaps in unequal and unpredictable ways.

The houses that feature in El lugar sin límites include El Olivo, the farmhouse of local landowner and politician, Alejandro Cruz, and then the various properties that constitute Estación El Olivo, the hamlet that is both dependent upon and threatened by the estate whose name it shares. The village was established to service the needs of Cruz’s vineyards, but the coopers who made his barrels have mostly moved out, and the railway station is practically unused. Everything travels along the new highway, which bypassed the settlement and condemned it to what seems like terminal decline. All that remains are a church and a small brothel that has seen better days. The villagers’ one hope is the promise that electricity will come to Estación El Olivo. Cruz tells them that he’s putting pressure on the authorities to hook them up to the national grid. For the brothel’s part-owner, a young woman known as the “Japonesita,” with the coming of electric power everything would change: “the entire town would come back to life with electricity.” Above all, she would immediately swap her hand-cranked Victrola record player with a flash new Wurlitzer jukebox: “As soon as they brought electricity to the town she’d buy a Wurlitzer. Immediately. [. . .] The most colourful one, the one with a beach scene showing palm trees by a turquoise sea, the biggest machine of the lot” (136-137).

Note that this is a not a case of some kind of organic community faced with the coming of modernity, or of nature replaced by technology. El Olivo is an outgrowth of agribusiness from the start. If this is a village in ruins, these are capitalist ruins, the ruins of modernity itself. And there is nothing particularly natural here: the vines are laid out in geometric patterns, fully part of a social network from the start. Rather, what’s at stake is the replacement of one machine by another: turntable by jukebox, train by truck, while un-needed equipment is cast aside, like the “antediluvian threshing machine” left rusting by the railway track (117).

But one never knows when an outmoded or neglected machine might come in handy again. For the same word that the Japonesita uses of the Wurlitzer, “aparato” or apparatus, is also the term used by her co-owner, a flamboyant transvestite who goes by the name of “Manuela,” when referring to his (her) penis: “This piece of kit [este aparato] is no use to me except to go pee” (168). And it turns out that Manuela’s apparatus is not only surprisingly large (drawing comments such as “What a donkey!” and “Look how well equipped he is” [168]) but also in full working order. For the Japonesita is in fact Manuela’s daughter, offspring of a bet that landlord Cruz made to the brothel’s previous Madam that she couldn’t arouse him, couldn’t put his equipment to work. Riding on the bet was ownership of the brothel itself, and Manuela agreed to go through with the indignity of being publicly (if briefly) brought back into the supposed sexual norm with the understanding that the property would be split between the two of them. So the house is dependent on well-functioning machinery in more ways than one: Manuela’s apparatus won him his share in it, but for lack of power it’s left lifeless when the Victrola finally breaks: “They no longer make parts for this type of machine [esta clase de aparatos]” (211). Still, the Japonesita is confident she can find a replacement in a second-hand shop in the city. Alongside the trade in novelty and the latest gadget is a parallel economy of refitting or repurposing the ruined detritus discarded along the way.

And it is in this spirit of bricolage and making-do that Donoso puts his (admittedly somewhat disillusioned) faith: in the kids who turn the urine-stained thresher into their playground, in Manuela’s piecing together her ripped rags into a red dress that may once again perhaps seduce even the most boorish of the locals, however briefly and however tragic the final outcome. As the Japonesita reflects, it’s happened before, that after one of his escapades Manuela has come back “with a black eye or a couple of broken ribs after the men, roaming drunks, have beaten him up for being a queer. What am I to worry about? Like a cat, he has nine lives” (214). Grit in the machinery of capitalist development, a cobbled-together apparatus or assemblage of patched rags and reworked ruins, the way of life presented in El lugar sin límites incarnates a corrosion neither fully within nor fully outside of modernity’s grand narrative. And for the same reason, it makes a mockery of the restricted spatiality of houses or households: it makes them spaces without limits.