Latin American Narrative: 1920s to Onetti

The Narrative in the 1920s and 1930s

The Latin American narrative of the 1920s and 1930s: The Latin American narrative of those years realistically portrays the American man in his relationship with the surrounding nature, which is called regionalism. It raises social problems arising from the clash between traditional economic order and new ideologies. Its characters are oppressed, defeated by the forces of nature, allied with political and economic landowners. Regionalism is characterized by a linear narrative supported by the chronological development of the facts. The narrator is omniscient and realistically describes the environment and characters, and expresses criticism of the events narrated.

Towards a New Narrative

Political and social change in the world prompted Americans to leave their regionalism and worry about universal problems. The Latin American narrative, then, without leaving the geographic framework that surrounds the characters, focuses on individual and subjective conflict. The city is the privileged setting, although the countryside also appears. The historical event is only the backdrop where the problem of a subject arises, but the emphasis is placed on the individual who, being the product of his time, cannot change and is its victim. The new narrative does not present a sequence of events but shows the interior of individuals whose experiences result from these events. A hopeless vision of life permeates the texts. The narrator is the protagonist or witness and exhibits, in the first person, the discourse of their thinking, a disordered flow of memories. The resources used are interior monologue and soliloquy. A speech is used without an interlocutor, directed by a character to another without response. The temporary space order is broken by using cinematographic resources: flashbacks, parallel sequences, and so on. The language is peculiar: it reproduces the speech of Hispanic Americans, and verbal experiments are performed, for example, distortions in the sense and the conformation of words or phrases.

Onetti

Onetti’s work might be considered anachronistic because it anticipates what was called the new Latin American novel. By the time Onetti wrote his works, the novel was a genre little cultivated in the Spanish language in the River Plate. There could be two types of novels: those with European themes (realistic) and those with local themes (fantastic). But Onetti did not adhere to either of these categories: he did not imitate external reality, but fragmented and distorted it, without going into the fantastic. He turned to the technique of fiction within fiction, an ancient tradition in narrative.

His work marks a turning point in Latin American literature: the urban man, violently plunged into a chaotic and distressing modernity. He belonged to the generation of 1940, marked by political disenchantment and nihilism, that is, the negation of all political, religious, or social principles, which leads to individualism tending to avoid the pain imposed by outsiders. Onetti suggested a narrative where two forces operate in balance: the world and the interior. His creatures are an absolute presence around which the story revolves. They are beings aware of their loneliness, trying to survive in a hostile world. But fate overcomes them in the short or long term: on a path of failure, they come to death. They accept reality and escape into the interior through consciousness or dreams, increasingly leading to loneliness and isolation. They are pessimists who have lost their ideals, and feelings are degraded. They undertake actions without ethics, and friendship and love lose authenticity.