2 - The novela de la tierra

Summary

He also thought he recognized trees and crop fields that he could not have named, because his actual knowledge of the countryside was quite inferior to his nostalgic and literary knowledge of it.

Jorge Luis Borges

Judging from current attitudes prevalent among most literary critics, the expression novela de la tierra would seem to be more than simply an attempt to reflect the thematics of the texts that are conventionally grouped under that rubric; for the term could be interpreted metaphorically as well to describe the position these works are deemed to occupy in the edifice of contemporary Latin American letters: they are considered to be the coarse, unfinished foundation of the structure, whose principal function is to give support to the building erected on them. This is, I believe, an accurate description of the manner in which most modern critics have confronted and analyzed these works, endeavoring to identify in them everything that present–day Latin American literature has transcended, has left behind on its way to achieving its current preeminence.

Hence, it is not surprising to find that contemporary critical discourse on the novela de la tierra almost invariably exudes an air of complacency vis-à-vis its subject matter. Such a comfortable posture clearly informs the following assertion by Mario Benedetti: “ [Regionalist literature] has already exhausted itself in almost all Latin American countries, and one can say today that it is a thing of the past, an experience that only has a place (a well–earned place, nonetheless) in the manuals and histories of literature.”