Guillermo Cabrera Infante and the Meanings of Literature

Abstract

Unanimously considered one of the greatest Latin American writers of the entire 20th century, the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante is also the author who, despite his tendency to ignore the pattern of traditional fiction, also succeeds in establishing a new type of connection to the great tradition of world literature, following the steps of Miguel de Cervantes and, up to a certain point, symbolically going back to the celebrated model of Don Quixote. Cabrera Infante’s masterpiece, Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres, 1965) thus questions the place and meanings of literature itself in the contemporary world, and the characters involved in the process organize their (fictitious) life around textual aspects, underlining the importance of a new kind of interpretative relationship, to be established between reader and writer