History after history's end: cultural reconstruction in «Margarita, está linda la mar»

Stephen Henighan

Storytelling shapes its audience's conception of history. The first storytellers were not merely entertaining their comrades around the proverbial campfire: they were mythologising the history of their community. If, as a popular postmodern view contends, history has now ended, having been dealt a series of mortal blows by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the advent of the simultaneous present of the internet and the 500-channel universe, and the replacement of alliances based on ideology with regional trading blocks such as NAFTA and the European Union, what happens to storytelling? What tale is the teller recounting when there is no longer a palpable, distinctive history requiring mythologisation?

Jean-François Lyotard defined the postmodern condition in terms of «l'incrédulité à l'égard des métarécits» (Lyotard, 7). For Lyotard postmodern skepticism set in upon the completion of the post-Second World War reconstruction of Western Europe. The rebuilt Europe was a simulacrum, its links to history severed. The result, Lyotard argued, was that: «La fonction narrative perd ses foncteurs, le grand héros, les grands périls, les grands périples et le grand but. Elle se disperse en nuages d'éléments langagiers narratifs [...] Nous ne formons pas de combinaisons langagières stables nécessairement, et les propriétés de celles que nous formons ne sont pas nécessairement communicables» (Lyotard, 7-8). Volatile and uncommunicable linguistic configurations beggaring language of its narrative impulse were among the consequences of a world reconstructed beyond history. Words deprived of their historical contexts could generate only pastiche, or art that was opaque and devoid of shared significance. European history, the cauldron in which the ideologies whose competition shaped the twentieth century cohered, had provided the form, in Lyotard's view, for traditional and modern narrative.

From the perspective of the Americas these European narrative traditions were more adaptable than adoptable. Only when modified in terms of language, subject matter and technique could they recount the native, immigrant or culturally hybrid histories of the Americas. Yet these histories, too, appear threatened with annihilation as the advance of the post-1990 economic order spreads cultural patterns originating in the commercialized mythology of the United States throughout the hemisphere, enforcing a market-driven model which extinguishes eccentric regional, ethnic, social, linguistic and cultural formations. This process accelerates the erosion of local histories and, with them, autochtonous forms of storytelling. It is no surprise that the principal guru of the mantra that history has ended, Francis Fukuyama, is a member of a forcibly assimilated ethnic group within the United States. After the events of 1989-1990, Fukuyama argues, it is no longer possible to speak of «history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times» (Fukuyama, xii). By «history» Fukuyama means a history of contending ideas, of vigorous social and cultural differences in perpetual dynamic contradiction. Where Lyotard's vanished history is presumed to embody a universalising unity, Fukuyama views Western history, born in Europe, as an unruly entity whose multiplicity and eternal instability must be flattened to achieve a homogenized world conducive to U. S. suzerainty. Fukuyama celebrates the end of history as the death of cultural difference, writing «that the idea of a universal and directional history leading up to liberal democracy may become more plausible to people, and that the relativist impasse of modern thought will in a sense solve itself» (Fukuyama, 338). The death of the cultural differences that render storytelling essential, for Fukuyama, is the death of an unwieldy «relativism» ill-suited to univocal U. S. conceptions of social organization. It is the death of the Other, and his or her cumbersome difference. As Jean Baudrillard has argued, describing the Persian Gulf War -the first war to take place outside and beyond history: «ce à quoi [les Américains] font la guerre, c'est à l'altérité de l'autre, et ce qu'ils veulent, c'est réduire cette altérité, la convertir, ou sinon l'anéantir si elle est irréductible (les Indiens)» (Baudrillard, 30-31).

Baudrillard's mention of American native peoples, referring to the genocide of these peoples in the United States during the 19th century, strikes a bizarre echo in the closing image of The End of History and the Last Man, where Fukuyama likens the world's nations setting out on the voyage towards U. S.-ruled postmodernity to wagons making up a wagon-train heading west across the American prairie. Conceding that in the short term undesirable cultural differences may persist, preventing all nations from arriving simultaneously at the promised land beyond history's end, Fukuyama asserts that some nations may be «attacked by Indians» (Fukuyama, 338), but that most of the wagons will roll into town eventually. History will reach the plateau of perfect stasis where no Indians remain to attack the settlers: where cultural difference has become extinct.

Neither Lyotard's lament for the loss of European authenticity in the aftermath of the Second World War nor Fukuyama's Yankee triumphalism, pivoting on a positive image of 19th-century genocide, are useful to most citizens of the Americas. Fukuyama offers only suffocation by the myths of an all-powerful U. S. empire. Baudrillard provides an acerbic critique of the disappearance of history, but no program for recovering history's storytelling potential. If storytelling in the Western hemisphere has thrived on the distortion of history-centred European narrative modes, bending them to local conditions as the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis did in the 19th century and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez did in the 20th century, then how does such narrative respond to the post-1990 U. S.-led banishment of history by homogenized globalization? How does a writer who is conscious of the forces orchestrating «the end of history» mobilize the particular historical features of his or her regional or national linguistic or cultural conditions to generate meaningful narrative which exhibits an awareness of how the world has changed without abandoning the nourishing material of cultural specificity?

Sergio Ramírez's novel Margarita, está linda la mar (1998) is a provocative example of how storytellers in the Americas may reconstruct autochthonous cultures in the face of globalizing homogenization by continuing to narrate through the vehicle of their national histories without losing sight of the ways in which globalization and the collapse of traditional chronologies and ideologies has rendered the assumptions of history increasingly problematic. In addition to being Nicaragua's most accomplished novelist, Ramírez has direct and bitter experience of «the end of history» through his career as vice-president of Nicaragua during the Sandinista government and, as recounted in his poignant memoir Adiós muchachos: una memoria de la revolución sandinista (1999), through the Sandinista defeat in the elections of 1990. Ramírez is a writer who has adapted to the globalized world -he has a literary agent and one of the most sophisticated websites of any contemporary novelist [SergioRamirez.org.ni]- yet he persists in writing novels immersed in national history in the face of his adaption to the globalized world.

Margarita, está linda la mar reconstructs the history of Nicaragua during the first half of the 20th century by conflating and suggestively mingling two return visits to Nicaragua by the country's greatest poet, Rubén Darío, the first in 1907 and the second in 1916, with an account of the assassination of the dictator Anastasio Somoza García in 1956. Ramírez's ideological position is divided. Always an anomaly within the Sandinista government, his outlook is part Third World revolutionary and part European-style social democrat. Both of these strands emerge in his memoirs. Describing his resignation from the Sandinista Front in 1994, Ramírez notes the presence in the room of a portrait of the legendary Nicaraguan guerrilla Augusto César Sandino: «Era como si hubiera estado allí, otra vez, para despedirme. O para recibirme» (Ramírez 1999, 289). The message could hardly be clearer: Sandino is dispatching Ramírez back into private life to perform his guerrilla's duty through his writing. This interpretation is supported by Ramírez's use of detail. He notes, for example, that in the portrait Sandino is wearing «un juego de lapicero y estilográfica» (1999, 289). The guerrilla, adorned with an interlaced pencil and fountain pen, is also a writer, while Ramírez, the man who is leaving politics to become a writer, retains the ethos of the guerrilla. Yet Ramírez opens his memoirs with the claim that the Sandinista Revolution «dejó como su mejor fruto la democracia, sellada en 1990 con el reconocimiento de la derrota electoral y que como paradoja de la historia es su herencia más visible» (1999, 17).

Ramírez's celebration of both the Sandinista Revolution's liberal legacy and its anti-liberal values of military struggle, national liberation, moral duty and class warfare are also visible in Margarita, está linda la mar. In the epilogue the reader learns that, after the democratizing Sandinista Revolution, Capitán Prío is able to learn more about the events of the 1956 assassination by reading government reports that are now in the public domain (Ramírez 1998, 364-365). In counterpoint to this liberal assertion, Ramírez lauds the historical figure of Rigoberto López Pérez, the young poet who assassinated Somoza García, as the prototype of a guerrilla of the Sandinista Front (which was not founded until 1961, five years after the assassination). Rigoberto's farewell letter to his mother resounds with phrases reflecting a revolutionary ethos of duty, responsibility and absolute values rather than a liberal vocabulary of rights and freedoms. Rigoberto's invocation of «mi más alto deber de nicaragüense» (1998, 178) echoes Sandinista rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s. Like the Sandinistas, Rigoberto is a partisan of revolution through the spread of both literacy and literary enthusiasms who believes that a lack of acquaintance with books is «la ignorancia» (1998, 71). Ramírez constructs a revolutionary genealogy that leads from Augusto César Sandino's warfare against the occupying U. S. Marines in the 1920s and 1930s to Rigoberto's self-sacrifice in 1956 and on to the Sandinista guerrillas of the 1960s and 1970s. The link between Sandino and Rigoberto is made explicit by Ramírez's repeated references to the fact that both are castrated in death and buried separated from their testicles.

If the post-1990 order is ahistorical, it is also axiomatically a liberal order, predicated upon the global spread of the forms of Western liberal democracy (however vacant of content such forms may prove upon scrutiny), and to the introduction of limitless choice in terms of the individual's consumption of material goods, lifestyles, mobility, communication, and entertainment (however much such privileges may be limited to specific groups within given societies). Ramírez stands athwart the historical, patriarchal past of duties and responsibilities -of the authoritarian dictator defied by the audacious guerrilla- and the liberal present of painless multiplication of atemporal, unverifiable, morally indistinguishable possibilities. The structure of Margarita, está linda la mar reflects this bifurcation.

Like Spanish American novels of the 1960s, such as Mario Vargas Llosa's La casa verde (1965) or Carlos Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Margarita, está linda la mar employs a narrative structure in which scenes are arranged with mathematical symmetry. Ramírez generates his national mythology through the repetition of complex motifs which the reader must concentrate to grasp, and whose comprehension depends on understanding the ways in which these motifs are implanted in a text which establishes its own rules for reading and decipherment. In this sense Ramírez is invoking the active reader -«el lector macho», in Julio Cortázar's controversial phrase (Cortázar, 23)- sought by the Boom writers of the 1960s rather than the more passive reader to whom the Post-Boom fables of writers such as Antonio Skármeta and Isabel Allende are directed. Yet, where the Boom writers, fired up by the revolutionary certainties circulating in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, concealed hard facts within the complex skeins of their narratives -nuggets of meaning whose interpretation might be debatable but whose essence was certain- Ramírez casts doubt on the very course of events, portraying all history as at once a verifiable communal past and a subjective individual hallucination. The novel's title, a citation from a poem by Rubén Darío, draws attention to the literariness of its narrative world; where the Boom novels consumed and refashioned historical reality in the God-destroying engine of the novela total, Ramírez's title makes a post-modern bow in the direction of the precept that literature evolves from other literature, and that all storytelling is playful and arbitrary rather than a grand, faithful chronicle of events, however artfully arranged.

Margarita, está linda la mar is structured according to a contrapuntal alternation between two different types of chapters. The even-numbered chapters (though the chapters have no numbers) contain linear narration of the events of 1956 leading up to the assassination of the dictator Somoza García by the poet López Pérez during Somoza's visit to the city of León. The odd-numbered chapters (though, again, they are not numbered) have a peculiar structure. All begin in the third person with the character of Capitán Prío, whose outlook, like that of Ramírez himself, is divided. Prío is a member of the conspiracy to assassinate Somoza. His position makes him the sole character who is able to perceive the totality of the historical context of events. Rather than a reliable arbiter, though, Capitán Prío exercises the more limited authority of a referee: the novel's opening sentence compares his appearance to that of a «referee de boxeo» (Ramírez 1998, 15). From a description of Capitán Prío's observations during the hours preceding the assassination, the action passes to a flashback which narrates, from one odd-numbered chapter to the next, the last two journeys of Rubén Darío to his native land. The modulations between the day of the assassination in 1956 and the Darío scenes, set in 1907 and 1916, occur unannounced.

From the Darío flashback, each odd-numbered chapter proceeds to a so-called tertulia, or informal discussion group, where various characters, including Capitán Prío, discuss the «film» they have just seen -which is to say, the flashback that the reader has just read. The temporal position of this discussion group is unclear. It is possible that these discussions are taking place many years in the future, after a number of the participants are dead. In their discussions, the members of the group debate the verisimilitude of the novel's account of Darío's visits to Nicaragua. Their perception of these events not as prose narrative, but as a film, underlines the novel's depiction of history as a fluid, ungraspable entity, and emphasizes the dissolution of the boundaries between traditional narrative forms associated with postmodern art.

One member of the tertulia, Erwin, asks: «¿Quién estaba allí filmando esa película?» and receives this response from Capitán Prío: «Son reconstrucciones históricas [...] No hay que dudar de ellas» (Ramírez 1998, 69). Like Baudrillard, for whom history has been diminished to a video show, the members of the tertulia express their doubts concerning the details of the version of history which is being presented to them: Was Rubén Darío a drunk or wasn't he? Did the young soldier Anastasio Somoza García ask for the hand of Salvadora Debayle during Darío's funeral, or at some more discreet moment? Questions such as these announce Ramírez's abandonment of the Flaubertian definition of the narrator as a deity who is everywhere present but nowhere visible, which was espoused by the early novels of the Boom. The narrator of Margarita, está linda la mar fails in his efforts to harmonize an unambiguous procession of events, even as he intervenes more obtrusively as the narrative advances.

Erwin complains about the notion of narrative ominiscience, when he faults Rigoberto, who appears to be narrating the Darío scenes, for claiming knowledge not only of what occurred but also of what Darío was thinking: «Ya llegamos a un punto en que Rigoberto sabe hasta lo que Darío estaba pensando» (Ramírez 1998, 101). Erwin's point about past events is clear: even when one succeeds in establishing an accepted chronology, the private thoughts and motivations of historical figures remain enigmatic. At the same time, Ramírez presents his readers with the contrary view, that of Rigoberto, who demonstrates supreme confidence in the correctness of his historical interpretations. Rigoberto is outraged by the suggestion that he may be tampering with the historical record: «¿Cómo se le ocurre que voy a alterar los hechos históricos?» (Ramírez 1998, 101). As a revolutionary destined to carry out an assassination, Rigoberto cannot allow himself the doubts saturating postmodern liberalism. Past events are a sacred text dictating the script for future actions; there is no room for multiple interpretations or differing points of view. Rigoberto inhabits a world circumvented by a morality which defines in absolute terms concepts of right and wrong, good and evil; moral certainties of this type necessarily repose on an unambiguous interpretation of history. To act decisively in the present, Rigoberto must be free of doubts about the trajectory of the past. (At the same time, in a contradiction typical of this novel, the Rubén Darío imagined by Rigoberto is a man skeptical of the completeness of formal history. At one point he invites his listeners: «Escuchen esta historia que no aparecerá nunca en mi autobiografía» (Ramírez 1998, 133). History's chronic incompleteness is part of the anguish that Rigoberto's seer-like reimagining of the past -like the novela total of the 1960s, or the totalizing explanations of revolutionary ideology- attempts to banish).

As the narrative advances, the arbitrary qualities of the odd-numbered chapters begin to contaminate the even-numbered chapters. The third-person narrator of the even-numbered chapters interrupts the narrative to address the reader, confessing the limitations of his omniscience. Describing the events of the afternoon prior to the assassination, the narrator of the even-numbered chapters states: «Rigoberto había hecho una estación en la casa de Rosaura [...] no prevista para mí, y por eso hasta ahora puedo darles cuenta. Ya dije que no era un día fácil» (Ramírez 1998, 224). As events fly out of control, whirling towards the closing image of chaos, the narrator grows more hortatory, enjoining the reader to contribute to his scrutiny of the action: «Vengan conmigo cuanto antes para situarnos [...] Vean a La Caimana [...] Quédense mejor todos donde están...» (Ramírez 1998, 267-268). References to destiny as a capricious, uncontrollable force begin to appear: «¡Oh, tristes costureras! ¡Con qué hilos equivocados se alistan a remendar la tela!» (Ramírez 1998, 230) and «Fortuna, soberana de las veleidades» (Ramírez 1998, 319). Ramírez mythologizes his country's history, creating memorable images of important Nicaraguan figures such as Anastasio Somoza García and Rubén Darío, at the same time that he mocks historical chronology and toys with events within the presumed eternal present of postmodern discourse. His narrative hews out a historical dimension within a postmodern, post-historical narrative landscape. Many of Ramírez's narrative hijinx bear the self-indulgent stamp of much postmodern invention. The contemporary Salvadoran novelist Manlío Argueta enjoys a walk-on role in the novel, reincarnated as the owner of a small shop in San Salvador in the 1950s (Ramírez 1998, 44); the British playwright Harold Pinter appears as a «sabio victoriano» (Ramírez 1998, 126). Some of the more playful details are simply private jokes. For example, the dictator Somoza's Yankee security advisor is named Van Wynckle -presumably a reference to Rip Van Wynckle, containing an implicit jab at the United States for remaining metaphorically «asleep» in its relations with Latin America. Van Wynckle, the reader learns, «Habla un español perfecto, con acento argentino» (Ramírez 1998, 259). The Argentine accent is borrowed from William Bowdler, the U. S. State Department official with whom Ramírez negotiated the 1979 transition agreement paving the way for the Sandinistas' accession to power, who was an American raised in Buenos Aires (Ramírez 1999, 100, 267). Similarly, Ramírez nicknames Rubén Darío's widow La Maligna -a designation that is doubly suggestive given that La Maligna's real name was Rosario Murillo, which, a century later, was also the name of the wife of Ramírez's one-time collaborator from whom he is now estranged on both a personal and an ideological level, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega (Ramírez 1998, 30-32).

This accumulation of largely gratuitous postmodern gamesmanship coexists with the creation of scenes, buttressed by different degrees of authority, which succeed in mythologizing vital moments in the development of a distinctively Nicaraguan historical chronology. One scene which can be read as both postmodern pastiche and modernist forging of the consciousness of a nation in the smithy of the novelist's soul describes the sage Debayle's extraction of Rubén Darío's brain after the poet's death. The character of Dr. Debayle -a grandson of the 19th century French novelist Stendhal (Henri Beyle) and the grandfather of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last and most vicious of the Somoza dictators- incarnates the blending of high and low, cultured and crude, trivial and resonant detail on which the novel thrives. «¡La mierda revuelta con la gloria!» exclaims Segismundo, one of the members of the tertulia, on learning of the connection between Stendhal and Somoza (Ramírez 1998, 70). Dr. Debayle's extraction of Rubén Darío's brain -the source of Nicaragua's greatest claim to a national high culture- presages the brutality his son-in-law and grandson will visit upon the Nicaraguan body politic, tracing the ideology behind this violence to the positivism dominant in Latin American intellectual circles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Debayle's paroxysms of ecstasy upon discovering that Darío's brain weighs more than those of Victor Hugo or Johann Schiller parody both the pseudoscience inspired by positivism and the modernist myth of the artist as transcendant genius. Like Sandino and Rigoberto after him, Darío is buried with one part of his body separated from the rest.

The living link among the three mutilated bodies that describe the arc of Nicaraguan history during the first half of the 20th century is the idiot boy, Quirón. As a youth Quirón steals the flask containing Darío's pickled brain from Major Appleton, the commander of the U. S. occupation forces; in old age he steals the flask containing Rigoberto's testicles from under the nose of the U. S. security advisor Van Wynckle and his National Guard thugs, creating the novel's closing image of a madman clutching a flask careering «hacia la fuente de noche y de olvido, hacia la nada» (Ramírez 1998, 369). Quirón's birth is obscure. Though he is the illegitimate son of a local priest (Ramírez 1998, 201), the narrative suggests that he may have been engendered from the pages of one of Darío's poetry collection Prosas profanas (1896) and that he «nació con el siglo» (Ramírez 1998, 28-29), confirming his role as paradigm of 20th-century Nicaragua. In snatching back Darío's brain, Quirón is reclaiming his intellectual and symbolic paternity; he steals Rigoberto's testicles in a blind reenactment of his initial crime. Quirón's anguished search for identity, like the cycle of repetition represented by his two thefts and the two U. S. military officials, dramatizes the circular history of a colonized nation. It is only with the Sandinista Revolution that Nicaragua breaks out of the state of tutelage embodied by Quirón and emerges into a progressive mode where the country is able to forge its own identity. Under U. S. military occupation -whether direct, as in the time of Sandino, or indirect, as under the Somozas- the only development is the degradation represented by the decline from Darío's brain to Rigoberto's testicles.

The castration motif is pervasive in Margarita, está linda la mar. This motif operates at two levels. At the most obvious level castration serves as an emblem of Nicaragua's impotence before the power and domination of the United States. Hence the two freedom fighters who emerge prior to the foundation of the liberating Sandinista Front, Augusto César Sandino and Rigoberto López Pérez, are both castrated in death by surrogates of U. S. power. The epilogue reveals that three of Rigoberto's accomplices, Erwin, Norberto and Cordelio Selva, were later «castrados en vida» (Ramírez 1998, 373) in Somoza's prisons before being executed. The dictator exercises his power by annihilating his enemies' manhood. The figure of the dictator, in any Latin American nation, represents patriarchal power writ large. Yet Somoza's machismo, even his manhood, is flawed and suspect. His arrival in León is greeted by a cry from the crowd celebrating the dictator's potency: «¡Qué viva el perromacho, jodido!» (Ramírez 1998, 16). Yet the narrative goes on to feminize him. Somoza's wife, the First Lady, is described as suffering through the arrival ceremony, «atormentada por el corsé que reprimía sus carnes» (Ramírez 1998, 16). But of the dictator the reader learns «también lo atormentaba un corsé de peso liviano que reprimía sus carnes, el corsé de peso liviano tejido en hilo de acero que le había enviado Edgar J. Hoover [sic], con su tarjeta personal, por mano de Sartorius Van Wynckle» (Ramírez 1998, 16-17). The narrative participates in machista ideology by using a parallel structure to equate Somoza with his wife, calling into question his manhood by equating the bullet-proof vest bestowed upon him by J. Edgar Hoover with his wife's corset. Rumours of the dictator's organic incompleteness run through the novel. When he is assassinated, the examination of his body reveals that part of his anus is missing and that he must defecate into a rubber bag attached to his waist (Ramírez 1998, 350). Somoza's dying order that Rigoberto's corpse be castrated appears in this light as his attempt to impose on other Nicaraguans his own neutered subservience before the United States. Yet this traditional usage of the image of castration, contributing to the construction of a linear account of Nicaraguan history moving from colonized impotence to revolutionary virility, coexists with a second, more complex set of images consistent with Ramírez's awareness of the postmodern deconstruction of the central narratives of Latin American culture, including the myth of machismo. If the permanently infantile, Calibanesque Quirón represents a male image of Nicaraguan identity under neo-colonial domination, his female counterpart is La Caimana (Alligator-Woman). Born on the same day in 1900 as Quirón, in a different neighbourhood of León, La Caimana is sexually ambiguous. An accomplice of Anastasio Somoza García in his early career as a counterfeiter, La Caimana becomes in middle age an unwitting accessory to his assassination. To her contemporaries, La Caimana appears «marimacha» (Ramírez 1998, 84), or tomboyish, or lesbian. The narrative suggests that she may be transgendered. As an adolescent she is subjected to an operation by Dr. Debayle, who attempts to graft a fabricated penis to her body. The operation goes awry when the penis becomes infected and has to be removed. This parody of the attempts of positivist pseudoscience to bring all bodies into alignment with a rationalist norm contributes to Ramírez's portrait of the disintegration of Latin American patriarchal values. Edwin Williamson has argued that, in Latin America, «modernism gave writers the means to come to terms with the passing of the patriarchal authority of traditional Hispanic society» (Williamson, 563). Postmodernism, one might add, provides the means to question the extent to which Hispanic societies actually conformed to this authority. Ramírez, looking back on the 1950s from beyond the globalizing gulf of 1989-1990, perceives a society more multiple in its gender identities than could have been acknowledged at the time. In the postmodern spirit, the depiction of La Caimana originates partly in literature. Her name, her toughness, her profession as brothel-keeper, all signal her kinship with La Chunga, the hardnosed owner of the second of the two brothels in Mario Vargas Llosa's La casa verde.

The character of La Caimana exemplifies Ramírez's attempt to finesse the dilemma of the Nicaraguan writer, who becomes free to construct a national chronology and culture through literature only in an era when globalized consumerism has shattered the notions of communal cohesion and national history. Construction undertaken in a time of atomistic fragmentation is necessarily reconstruction. The novel's allusions to Stendhal and Victor Hugo exemplify the kind of novel Ramírez might have written had Nicaragua's accession to autonomous nationhood not been delayed by U. S. military occupation, then the forty-five-year quasi-occupation of the Somoza family, to an era when national autonomy is an increasingly problematic, and perhaps unsustainable, concept. Lyotard, ensconced in the security of a nation whose borders have remained unchanged since the time of Charlemagne, and whose notion of historical time has been validated by Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, the nouveau roman, and the management of an extensive colonial empire, can focus his attention on language as the source of volatility in the era of the breakdown of the great narratives. But for a novelist from one of the smaller nations of the Americas, the postmodern traitor is not language but history. The truth of events must be established, though there is no longer any truth; the community must be told its history, though the concept of community is fissuring; the chronology of the consolidation of national identity must be dramatized in bold scenes, though chronology, nationhood and identity have all become suspect. The novelist must walk a tightrope between modernist mythologization and postmodern atomization, generating a blending of the modernist and the postmodern that will permit the kind of cultural reconstruction Ramírez achieves in Margarita, está linda la mar.

• Baudrillard, Jean. La guerre du golfe n'a pas eu lieu. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1991.
• Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela. Ed. Andrés Amorós. Madrid: Cátedra, 1991.
• Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979.
• Ramírez, Sergio. Margarita, está linda la mar. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998.
• ——. Adiós muchachos: una memoria de la revolución sandinista. México, D. F.: Aguilar, 1999.
• Williamson, Edwin. The Penguin History of Latin America. London: Penguin, 1992.