THE PATHS OF THE SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL. ARTISTIC STRANDS, MARGINAL TEXTS, PROPOSALS FOR HISTORICIZATION.
The Spanish American novel has undergone a winding and uneven development; at different moments diverse aesthetic projects have coexisted, some closely tied to the continuity of expressive forms cultivated in Europe, while others have taken shape against the current, on the periphery of culture, expressed in heterogeneous texts composed through the mixing of other generic forms such as the proto-novel, memoirs, relations, satires, the “case,” travel accounts, etc. This facet has not been fully explored because it has not been entirely clear how to proceed with such a diverse and elusive corpus, yet one that may have contributed most fruitfully to the consolidation of the novelistic genre in Spanish America. Hence the relevance of incorporating the diversity of forms in which the novel has existed, of bringing critical attention to texts that have been left out of historical accounts of the novel; likewise, it is necessary to put forward proposals for historicizing the phenomenon, beyond the inventory of canonized works and authors.
The Spanish American novel is a territory of struggles and debates of a political and artistic nature, concerning the very conception of the genre and the function of literature, the role of the writer and the intellectual in the life of national territories, and we have not yet fully recovered this dimension of the genre’s life, forged in the heat of controversy. It is equally necessary to point out the vast corpus of comic-serious literature produced on the continent, which has received scant critical attention despite being another fundamental factor in the consolidation of the novelistic genre. It remains to be answered what paths it has had to travel, how diverse and ambivalent forms have coexisted within it, as well as the role that literature composed within the sphere of laughter has played in creating the novel. At a moment of acute economic, ecological, political, and ideological crisis such as the one we currently experience in the subcontinent, it becomes necessary to revisit the responses the novel has given to the dilemmas posed by a society in constant conflict, and how it updates itself.
