Logos and the Word

Readers and critics alike have found the dense - Joyce-like - verbal inventions of these two experimental Latin American novels gratuitous and incomprehensible. This study, however, by articulating the -grammar- of the neologisms, relating them to the thematic, stylistic, and semiotic elements of the text, and exposing their linguistically motivated nature, reveals the textual languages not as a descent into Babel but as attempts to storm a linguistic Eden. The study sets up a comparative framework for both works through a new, formal definition of the Latin American novel of language. The ensuing discussion establishes that whereas the Brazilian author shapes language into a more transparent and -natural- copy of (his vision of) the world, Cabrera Infante invents a pure, non-referential -anti-language- as secret as the Havana nightworld of Tres tristes tigres."