Latin American Literature and Spanish Language Evolution
The Latin American Novel in the Sixties
The 1960s marked the final consecration of the Latin American novel. This was due to both its intrinsic quality and extra-literary factors. Among these factors, we must mention the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the development of the Spanish publishing industry, and a book policy that attempted to retrieve the Latin American market that existed in Spain before the war. Additionally, many of these novels were translated into English, German, and French, and frequent film adaptations reached a wide audience.
The general outlines of the period are as follows:
- a) A preoccupation with narrative structures that require an active reader capable of organizing the subject of the story: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez.
- b) Development of linguistic experimentation and experimentation with new techniques and ways of telling: Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar.
- c) Invention of various fictional universes: Comala, in Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo; Macondo, in the novels of Gabriel García Márquez; Santa María, in those of Juan Carlos Onetti.
- d) Appearance of historical-social novels, with a broad overview of national inquiry: On Heroes and Tombs, by Ernesto Sábato.
- e) Focusing on existential issues, a departure from the psychological aspects of characters, and a deepening of mythology: Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa.
The list of authors and works of this period is overwhelming. However, in addition to the above, we must also cite others such as the Cubans José Lezama Lima: Paradiso, Alejo Carpentier: Explosion in a Cathedral; the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos, a Spanish citizen: Son of Man; the Mexican Carlos Fuentes: The Death of Artemio Cruz; and the huge figure of Jorge Luis Borges, who continued to publish: Brodie’s Report.
In the last decades of the century, the established figures continued to publish, although many of these writers were forced into exile. Novels written during this time are generally less demanding for the reader. Several novels about dictators were written, such as The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez and I, the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos. Other novels explored subjective and intimate themes, such as Love in the Time of Cholera by the Colombian Nobel laureate.
The Spanish Language in America
From the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, with the exception of Brazil, plus some Caribbean islands, a variety of Spanish is spoken. This Spanish was brought by the Spanish colonizers from the 16th century onwards. On a broad base of southern dialects, it was enriched with some input from Native American languages and other European languages, especially French, English, and Italian in Argentina.
Today, Spanish is the official language in 18 Latin American republics. It is co-official with Guaraní in Paraguay and with English in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The Spanish spoken in America, with the obvious variations of a language spoken in such a vast territory and with such different linguistic substrates, has a number of common characteristics, which are shown below:
Phonetic
- The lisp (sapato instead of zapato), aspiration of the ‘s’ in implosive position (cajtaña instead of castaña), and yeísmo (yave instead of llave) are the main phonetic features of this variety of Spanish, all common to the dialects of southern Spain.
- A more melodic intonation may be added, with more melodic overtones than the Castilian of the peninsula.
Morphosyntactic
- Voseo, the substitution of the pronoun tú for vos, introducing a monophthongized form of the second person plural (sentate instead of siéntate), is a peninsular archaism preserved in Argentina and Uruguay.
- Different use of the bypass through diminutives and augmentatives: ahorita voy (I’m coming right now), la muchachita (the little girl), lindita gente (nice people).
- Increased use of the simple past tense to the detriment of the compound past: ahora vino (he has now come) instead of ahora ha venido.
- More frequent use of the adverbialized adjective: camina bonito (he/she walks beautifully).
- Preposing the possessive in the vocative: ¡Vení, mi hijo! (Come, my son!).
- Absence of leísmo and laísmo.
Lexical-Semantic
The main lexical-semantic features are a higher persistence of archaisms (manta instead of cobija, cuadra instead of manzana, mercado instead of comprar, valija instead of maleta, etc.) and a more abundant use of terms from Native American languages (pavo, rancho, etc.). Some Latin American literary works require a glossary at the end for speakers from the Peninsula.
Despite the rich variety of nuances of a language spoken in such a vast territory, Spanish is characterized by its linguistic unity. Important cultural institutions like the Royal Spanish Academy, the Association of Spanish Language Academies, and the Cervantes Institute contribute to preserving this unity.