The magnitude of Roberto González Echevarría’s monograph is suggested by its title, and the book lives up to its promise. It yields insights into the evasive nature of the novel and proposes a coherent system that accounts for a variety of narrative practices in Latin American letters of the past five centuries.
González Echevarría’s well-grounded argument focuses on the multiple origins of the novel, its imitation of nonliterary forms endowed “with the capacity to bear the truth” (p. 8), and its persistent defiance of the very notion of the genre. But a distinctive mark of this ground-breaking approach is the way it links the development of the Latin American novel to three kinds of hegemonic discourse: the legal, the scientific, and the anthropological. By arguing persuasively that the novel emerges in the sixteenth century as a simulacrum of the discourse of the law and returns to that origin in its recent “archival” form, the author unveils a line of continuity that runs through Latin American narrative.
With this book González Echevarría confirms his sustained commitment to the interdisciplinary study of Latin American literature: he takes cues from literary critics (Bakhtin), uses creative borrowings from anthropological discursive practices (Geertz), draws on Foucault’s notion of the archeology of knowledge. On a methodological level the concept of archive—a modified version of Bakhtin’s genre memory—helps eliminate the opposition between synchronic and diachronic approach, between analysis and synthesis.
Because the book combines textual readings from Garcilaso’s Comentarios to the most recent novels of the so-called postboom with insights into the historically variable social conditions and is written in a lively, engaging style, it will certainly encourage a wide readership of literary critics, historians, and social scientists.
