Postlude

Summary

Cada estado social trae su expresión a la literatura, de tal modo, que por las diversas fases de ella pudiera contarse la historia de los pueblos con más verdad que por sus cronicones y sus décadas. (Martí, Prosas 98)

Analysing the evolution of Latin American literature in its Portuguese- as well as Spanish-language manifestations is often like watching a three-legged race – two individuals more or less moving in the same direction but often tugging against each other. In this study we have seen many cases of intellectual coincidence, that is, when a Spaniard and a Portuguese were writing about the world around them in complete isolation from each other, yet the ideas inspired by that reality seem – with the benefit of hindsight – remarkably similar, almost if they were penned by the same mind: such is the case with Columbus's and Vaz de Caminha's discovery-letters. Likewise religious men such as Motolinía and Fray Diego de Landa writing in Mexico, and José de Anchieta and Manoel da Nóbrega writing in Brazil, reached very similar conclusions about the Indians and Amerindian culture. Caviedes in the colonial era wrote satiric verse in Peru which – we can now see – overlapped in specific ways with Matos de Guerra's in Brazil, and José de Alencar wrote a Romantic novel in Brazil, Iracema, which is strikingly similar to Jorge Isaacs's Colombian masterpiece, María, though each of these writers was working independently of the other. Sometimes the writers from the two colonies knew of each other; yet here again the result was not always predictable; New Spain's Sor Juana de la Cruz, for example, fought tooth and nail against Brazil's Antônio Vieira, unleashing a theologicalcum- political storm which would lead eventually to her untimely death. At other times Spanish American and Brazilian literature seemed to be pulling in different directions; Lispector's fiction is as brilliant as García Márquez's but its agenda is very different, and it would be misleading to place Lispector post facto in the Boom. Indeed, even when Brazilian and Spanish American writers were pulling in the same direction – as occurred with the avant-garde, for there are specific similarities between the work of César Vallejo and Mário de Andrade – nevertheless the Brazilians were using a term Modernismo to describe the avant-garde which had already been used to mean something quite different in Spanish America at the end of the previous century (fin-de-siècle aestheticism).