Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative Book

The "theory" González Echevarría proposes goes something like this: Latin American "novels" don't adhere to any particular form or rules because they come, instead, from their age's dominant and power-giving discourse. The "novels" of the Conquest, for example, are the letters and testimonies of Columbus, Cortés, las Casas, etc., which were in fact legal documents. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, power shifted from legal into scientific domain, and so did the emphasis and words used in novels. The "current" discourse, apparently, is anthropology, and within that discourse the tendency to highlight the impossibilities of constructing authentic anthropological investigations -- that is, the impossibility of the Archive. He analyzes several texts, amongst them Carpentier's Pasos perdidos and Arpa y la sombra, which feature characters who are themselves involved in the process of writing and archiving their lives. While the book has proven influential and still deserves a read -- I don't think I've seen a better explanation why questions of the Archive are so pertinent to Latin American literature in particular -- it's also dated. Take with a grain of salt the author's insistence that his "theory" lays bare the canon of truly "major" novels, which, conveniently, are all authored by men, and mostly white men at that.