y has been "uneven and fragile" (Lowenthal vii) at best and profoundly antidemocratic at worst. The political history of Latin America during the formative years of Latin American identity per se has something to do with the shape of the region's literature, which might be described in the same way. In this regard, Brotherston (1) cites a 1930s statement by a Peruvian critic "that the Latin American novel didn't exist. And he was right, not because no-one in that area had ever published a novel, but in so far as common points of reference, a literary context, were hard to discern." Nietzsche's philosophy of history, together with Foucault's formulation of the archaeology of knowledge, is a helpful interpretive mechanism for this research, not least because Nietzsche and Foucault employ discourse as interpretation and critique of knowledge and history in ways that help explain how Latin American literature of the first half of the twentieth century understood and explored (or did not) truth and power in the region given the political context of the continent.
Of central relevance is Nietzsche's philosophical challenge to the legacy of rationalism, a conscious revolt against the Western tendency to pigeonhole thought and experience, in effect celebrating the prevailing world view in an ordered, bourgeois society: "I believe there has been no dangerous vacillation or crisis of German culture this century that has not been rendered more dangerous by the enormous and still continuing influence of this philosophy, the Hegelian" (Nietzsche 104). The self-contained, systemic totality of Hegelian thought, in Nietzsche's view, ossifies creativity and vitality: "to understand everything, how soft and pliable that makes one" (Nietzsche 105). This does not mean that systematic thought is not required but only that it "is suffering from the malady of history" (Nietzsche 120). He continues:
Excess of history has attacked life's plastic powers,...