Introduction
Latin America is the unique place on Earth that unites Eastern and Western literary traditions to create its own unique style. The period of colonialism and imperialism imposed European artistic traditions, and local writers tried to preserve their originality and independence. Such complicated relations between European tendencies and the Latin American approach continued to be crucial in the 20th century when local writers rethought and transformed European modernism and surrealism. Looking at contemporary literature from another perspective, it is evident that the 20th century was marked by huge challenges of dictatorships, civil wars, military coups, and economic inequality. This fact also influenced Latin American writers because they tried to oppose these totalitarian tendencies through their writing styles. This essay will focus on the short story “Unborn”, written by Augusto Roa Bastos in 1967. This story is an example of avant-garde literature because of the story’s absurdity and nonlinearity.
The Plot of the Story
“Unborn” is a complex and challenging story that is hard to summarize in a few sentences. The narrator talks about his suffering in search of his place in life. These existential searches occur against the backdrop of the narrator’s mother’s rather aggressive and emotionally oppressive attitude. For example, the narrator enjoys playing the drums like his dead father liked to play the guitar. However, mother responded: “once and for all: start making something useful of yourself, because you weren’t born to be a drummer, much less a singer” (Roa Bastos 331). What makes Roa Bastos’s story special is that this plot is presented through tens of metaphors and unexpected details.
The mystic part starts when the narrator indicates that he has memories from before being born. From this moment, the readers dive into the atmosphere of violence, evilness, and fear. The narrator describes how soldiers beat his father and how his mother beat her son after his father’s death. Such a cycle of post-traumatic stress disorder, broken hopes, and complete devastation leads the narrator to conclude that he must commit suicide.
Avant-Garde Techniques Used in the Story
The whole idea that the narrator remembers all the events that happened before his birth is actually an absurd idea that makes the story avant-garde. He tells the readers: “before being born, I am already older than you are, older than my dead father, much older than the oldest people in town” (Roa Bastos 335). It is a form of a postmodern approach to literature, the idea of which is to deconstruct the meaning and evidence of all aspects of traditional life. Through this absurdity, the author tries to abstract from the traditional meanings of the words “death”, “life,” and “family love” and look into the abyss beyond the boundaries of these concepts. This technique makes the discourse about childhood trauma and loneliness more complex and multidimensional. Nevertheless, it is a very complex approach to writing that is difficult for the average reader to grasp. Therefore, the problem with avant-garde Latin American literature, and this history in particular, is that a lot of the details needed for a postmodern genre can be misunderstood by the reader.
Another crucial peculiarity of the “Unborn” is the use of the narrative technique in which the plot is told without coherent chronological order. This approach is called nonlinear or disjointed narrative and is used mainly for talking on more general topics, while the chronological structure of the story is set in the background. In the story, the fact that the narrator is “unborn”, that is, he can remember many details of the past before his birth, makes the story’s chronology confusing and nonlinear. The reader learns about the present experiences of the narrator, plunges into the distant past, when the soldiers beat his father, and reflects on the future and the possibility of the narrator continuing to live with his mother. In other words, throughout history, the reader walks outside of time and “steps” behind the author’s thoughts. The purpose of this technique is to show the disorientation and fragmentation of the narrator’s throughs. It makes the story feel more personal because nonlinearity in the plot has a character-building function. This avant-garde approach of nonlinearity is characteristic of the modern era of Latin American literature, which is in search of a new writing technique.
Conclusion
To conclude, it was shown throughout the essay that the elements of absurdity and nonlinear narrative make Roa Bastos’s story avant-garde. Everyone who will closely read this story will totally agree with this assumption. In stories like Roa Bastos’s one, there are no taboo topics that emphasize the author’s opposition to tyrannies and dictatorships of Latin America. It is interesting for further research to investigate the distinctive features of Latin American avant-garde from similar traditions in Europe and Russia.
Work Cited
Roa Bastos, Augusto. “Unborn.” The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, edited by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 330–336.