Introduction
„El padre Rentería se acordaría muchos años después de la noche en que la dureza de su cama lo tuvo despierto y después lo obligó a salir. Fue la noche en que murió Miguel Páramo.” Comala, the weird place where the protagonist of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo arrives in search of his father, is nothing like the villages of lost childhood that the traditional European reader expects, nor it resembles a common „space of memory” to be reconstructed in a narrative journey. The place is abandoned, derelict and haunted by the voices of his inhabitants which intermingle in an almost absurd play: their meaning is never trully revealed and the hero will find out only towards the end of the novel that all the characters had died long before his arrival in the fantastic world of Comala.
One of the most famous novels of Latin American literature, A Hundred Years of Solitude opens by a rewriting of the moment of revelation from Pedro Páramo: „Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo…” Macondo is not only the literary inheritance of Juan Rulfo’s Comala, a cursed place of evershifting voices, but also the pretext of a distant recall, an almost impossible task of memory, different from its American or European counterparts.
If the first decades of the twentieth century represents the epoch of technical innovations in terms of narrative perspective, voice and expressions of de-centered subjectivity, its achievements will trigger also a dead-end of the classical „story” and of the historical functions of plot and „character”. The boom of Latin American Literature initiated in the late 50s seems to meet the expectations of a generation of famished readers craving for storytelling and later on enthrilled by the explosion of epic events in the novel. But no matter how relevant this stylistic change might be for the American or the European reader, one cannot ignore the insularity of the fantastic spaces that the Latin American fiction creates. Beyond the historical truth, the realistic conventions of storytelling or the limits of the self-reflexive literary language, these narratives configure cultural identies and define a new cultural space.
An authentic particularity of the Latin American culture definitely exists. Yet, to identify it becomes as difficult as structuring ultimate values for too large a space or a history. Crossing the remains of both the „Europe de la Renaissance” and the metis cultures belonging to a great number of vernacular peoples, Latin America experienced overflowing fluctuations in social, historical and artistic life. At the beginning of the XXth century, Latin American literature became one of the pillars of world literature, represented by works of extreme narrative invention, social, cultural or political issues that reshaped everything Europe had known. Magic realism, which is the oversaturated reality of Latin America brought into fictional works, is a concept that does not comprise this reality, though it implies it. Rather, it suggests that the logic of our world is to be transferred, as a new logic, to these texts of explosive imaginary.
The cultural space of Latin America sets an almost chaotic esthetic territory of vaste dimensions, between the boundaries of oblivion in One hundread Years of Solitude and Fuňes of Borges. The bibliography related to the issue is numerous. The fluid space of fiction, equally rich, is always to be discussed. Considering it implies the effort of a broad vision. This volume, The Latin American Novel, discusses the specific items of this area both from a theoretical point of view, willing to study thoroughly the place of these narratives in the wider cultural imaginary, and from an analytic point of view following the way these aspects of imaginary become real inside the fictional worlds.
Ovidiu Mircean & Vlad Roman