Running Out of Time: Developmentalism and the Latin American Boom

Abstract

During the mid-20th century, Latin American countries dreamed of participating in world history by connecting to the global economy. The concept of economic development organized a transnational desire to partake in the fruits of modern progress. This dissertation confronts developmentalism, the hegemonic political economy of the 20th century, to the most global manifestation of narrative modernization in the region, the Latin American Boom novel. I argue that a series of Boom novels expressed a persistent distrust of the political horizons of developmentalism, a modernization theory that proposes economic growth through mass industrialization as the driving force behind social progress. My focus is on a group of novels offered a skeptical response to the discourse of development. The corpus is comprised by Juan Carlos Onetti’s Santa María trilogy [La vida breve (1950), El astillero (1961), Juntacadáveres (1964)]; Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955); and José María Arguedas’ El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971). These novels expressed their skepticism not by denouncing its negative impact on the region but by showing the illusory status of the progress that economic development was supposed to bring. The literary strategy that characterizes these stories is a reversal of the progressive time of development by embedding anachronistic infrastructures into the setting. The resource to anachronistic infrastructures shows the fragile stability of modernizing projects, heavily dependent on past historical layers. In the following chapters, I trace how the Boom novel evolved to reflect the gradual decline of the developmentalist temporality. Two chronologies organize these chapters to mirror the regressive motion of Latin American modernization. In the first chronology, time moves forward. The date of publication of the novels follows the expansion of developmentalist modernization starting from its institutional consolidation in the 1950s with Onetti's La vida breve (1950) to the final collapse of the model in the 1970s, with Arguedas' El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971). In the second chronology, time moves backward. While the novels locate their narratives in the 20th century, their settings hinting at moments farther back in time. The more anachronism stresses the temporal structure of developmentalism, the more anarchic narration becomes. My claim is that these novels capture the historical experience of a regressive modernization. The more these novels diverge from the temporal structure of developmentalism through anachronism and digression, the more they distance themselves from the political allegories associated with the Boom novel. This is why I propose that a distinct novelistic genre emerged during this period, which I refer to as the counter-developmentalist novel, that condensed the profound disappointment resulting from the continental desire for development in literary form. Rather than surrendering to or abandoning modernization, the novels I study offer a critique by exposing the exhaustion of developmentalist time through crumbling industrial infrastructures. In these texts, the time of modernization has no relation to the hopeful impulse of infinite progress; instead, modern time, embodied in crumbling industrial infrastructures, is exhausted, expressing that the desire for Latin American development was ultimately doomed to fail.