Postmodern game of world culture achievements in the Juan Manuel Marcos’s novel “Gunter’s Winter”.

Abstract

Latin America literature is perceived in the minds of readers up to present days mostly as very exotic Creole writing of former European colonies. As the best possible variant, the reader might be able to name Marcos, Borges or Cortazar recalling the definition of "magical realism". At this point the consumer-household introspection (the introspection of an ordinary reader, who is used to be called "mass") of Latin America literature is actually exhausted while the home literary-critical scientific discourse is limited with mostly sporadic studies of creativity of the most famous representatives of Latin America literature. This is mainly Nobel laureates Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Miguel Angel Asturias, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, whose most important achievements are translated if not into Ukrainian but at least into Russian. It is not surprising, therefore, that the publication of the novel of the well-known Paraguayan scientist, teacher, social activist and writer Juan Manuel Marcos "Gunter’s Winter" (the first time published in Spanish in 1987, the Ukrainian translation was published only in 2014) remained without attention both on the part of the reader, and critic. The existence of some sporadic publications concerning the Ukrainian translation of this work in the Internet does not claim on the completeness of critical review of the text. So, the proposed article is the first attempt of scientific and critical reading of the novel "Gunter’s Winter" in the context of postmodern culture of the twentieth century, as well as in the context of Spanish-language literature of Latin America. By clearly seen with the unaided eye the juxtaposition of cultures (elements of the indigenous culture of the ancient Paraguay strangely integrate into modern Spanish and American cultural world), by the syncretism of the poetry of Latin America literature with the traditions of European intellectual prose of the twentieth century, by clear intertextuality, by style and narrative experimentation in the novel it may be guessed both personal life destiny of the author (the political dissident, exile, emigrant) and the history of the literature of whole South America. The latest one has passed the stages of dynamic development during the last century, from, in fact, its birth to the mastering of the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism and creating its own artistic, stylistic and aesthetic profile. This evolution of Latin America literature is customary expressed with the terms "boom" and "post-boom". The life and career of Juan Manuel Marcos just illustrates the fundamental principles of the prose of period the Post-Boom. Having suffered from political persecution and imprisonment (1973 – 1987), the author was forced to leave the motherland that influenced the formation of his attitudes and beliefs, and was embodied in the novel "Gunter’s Winter". It can hardly be called autobiographical (actually, the author was not aimed to write the autobiography), but with the plot it is easy to guess personal existential experience of the writer, worried for the fate of his country and the destiny of man, which was left all by himself with the system.