The Earth as Archive in Bombal, Parra, Asturias and Rulfo

Summary

The term ‘archive’ is common currency in criticism on Latin American literature, and especially in the analysis of magical realism. The term has often been used to locate early twentieth-century Latin American novels in relation to their successors during the 1960s Boom generation. In this way the archive constitutes a residual reference point from which the so-called Latin American legacy can be extracted. In this essay, however, the term ‘archive’ takes on a different meaning, becoming an active source which cannot be conceived of in its entirety. It is an archive similar to that referred to by Foucault since it ‘emerges in fragments, regions and levels’ and its

threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practice; it begins with the outside of our language (langage).

The archive is oblique and the authors studied here locate it within nature. In fact archive as embodied in the earth becomes a subterranean tesoro (treasure) which the writers excavate with the tools of imagination and language. Since Foucault conceives of archive as active and a life-source on its own terms, nature is a particularly appropriate embodiment of this idea and, as we shall see, is employed precisely to demonstrate the visceral materiality of life and death, culture and myth.

The texts studied here were written by María Luisa Bombal, Teresa de la Parra, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Juan Rulfo. While texts by the latter two authors are seen by most critics as paradigms of magical realism, the work of the other two authors – despite Flores's suggestion in 1955 that Bombal's ‘oneiric stories’ were direct precursors of magical realism's ‘magnificent flowering’ – are nowadays seen as only tangentially related to the movement; they nevertheless provide important new insights into the pre-history of magical realism.

1: María Luisa Bombal

Viewing earth as archive is especially revealing when considering the work of María Luisa Bombal. Critics have yet to uncover her literary archive and little is known about the writers or literary traditions which influenced her work. The most striking literary genre which permeates her work is Romanticism. Women in Romantic texts are often objectified, petrified: a common trope for French Romantic poets such as Baudelaire is the perfection of a woman's petrified, death-like state.