About Ficción

Ficción

Ficción was a literary magazine published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Editorial Goyanarte. It was founded in May 1956 by Juan Goyanarte and it was published until 1973. A bimonthly magazine of fiction, literature and the arts, it showcased Argentine and translated short fiction for nearly two decades. It closed in 1973, and this profile is written entirely in the past tense.

An honest note on sources belongs at the head of this profile. The verified core for Ficción is compact: its founder, its publisher, its city, its founding month and year, its closing year, its bimonthly rhythm and its character as a magazine of fiction, literature and the arts presenting Argentine and translated short stories. Unlike Sur or Punto de Vista, it has not been the subject of a widely available monograph in the sources consulted, and this profile therefore builds outward from those verified facts into the well-documented Buenos Aires magazine world in which Ficción operated, stating its limits openly rather than inventing contributors, issue counts or circulation figures that cannot be verified.

Founding by Juan Goyanarte in May 1956

Ficción was founded in Buenos Aires in May 1956 by Juan Goyanarte. Goyanarte founded the magazine and the publishing house that issued it, Editorial Goyanarte, making Ficción another example of the Argentine pattern in which a literary magazine and a book publisher were created as a pair by a single editor-publisher. The magazine carried the project into periodical form, appearing bimonthly, while the house anchored it in the book trade of the capital.

The date deserves attention. A literary magazine founded in May 1956 was born in the first year after the fall of Peronism, in the Argentina of the Revolución Libertadora, at the opening of a decade in which Argentine culture reorganised itself around new universities, new publishers and new reviews. Contorno, founded in 1953, was then in mid-course and redefining criticism; Ficción, arriving in 1956 with an emphasis on the short story itself rather than on critical doctrine, occupied a different and complementary place in that reorganisation: it was a magazine for reading fiction, Argentine and foreign, presented as literature and art.

A magazine of the short story

The directory record defines Ficción as a bimonthly literary magazine of fiction, literature and the arts that showcased Argentine and translated short fiction. That definition identifies its genre precisely. The Spanish-language literary system has always given the short story, the cuento, a centrality it does not enjoy in every literary culture, and Argentina's masters of the form, from Borges and Bioy Casares to the generation that followed them, made Buenos Aires one of the world capitals of short fiction. A magazine devoted to presenting short fiction, mixing Argentine stories with translated stories from other literatures, served the most characteristic Argentine literary form directly.

Translation, as with Sur a generation earlier, was structural rather than decorative. By placing translated fiction beside Argentine fiction in the same bimonthly issues, Ficción assumed that its readers wanted to judge local writing in world company and to read world writing in good Spanish versions. The arts coverage in its remit, literature and the arts, placed that fiction inside a broader cultural frame without converting the magazine into a general review. Its centre of gravity, by its title and its record, remained narrative invention: the title Ficción is itself the whole programme, stated in one word.

Editorial Goyanarte and the Buenos Aires book world

Editorial Goyanarte, the magazine's publisher, belonged to the mid-century Buenos Aires publishing expansion that made the Argentine capital the principal producer of Spanish-language books for the entire Hispanic world in the decades after the Spanish Civil War. Spanish publishing talent in exile, Argentine capital and printers, and a continental distribution network combined to give Buenos Aires houses a reach far beyond Argentina. A house magazine of fiction fitted that system naturally: it identified storytellers, tested them before a periodical readership and connected the short form, which book publishers often found commercially difficult, to the book trade that surrounded it.

Readers should note what is not claimed here. The sources used for this profile do not provide a verified catalogue of Editorial Goyanarte's books, a list of Ficción's editors beyond its founder, or tables of its contents, and none is reconstructed speculatively. The magazine's publisher, dates and character are the documented facts; the publishing context described in this section is the documented environment of Buenos Aires houses of its period, offered as context and labelled as such.

Ficción among the magazines of its decades

Ficción's life, 1956 to 1973, spanned a remarkable arc of Argentine magazine history. It began in the years when Contorno was closing and the criticism of engagement was ascendant; it continued through the 1960s, the decade of Primera Plana, of the Latin American Boom and of the transformation of Argentine journalism and publishing by new weeklies and new book houses; and it ended in 1973, the year of Perón's return to Argentina and of a political polarisation that would soon overwhelm the literary world altogether. A bimonthly of short fiction that held its course across those seventeen years occupied a deliberately literary position while the centre of magazine gravity shifted toward news, photography and politics.

That position has a historical value of its own. The Argentine 1960s are often told through news magazines and through the Boom novel, but the short story, the form in which Argentine literature had first achieved world distinction, continued to need periodical homes, and Ficción was one of the homes the record preserves. Its nearly two decades of bimonthly publication amount, by the arithmetic of its stated rhythm, to a substantial body of issues across its run; the exact issue total is not given in the verified sources used here and is therefore not stated as fact.

Bimonthly rhythm and readership

A bimonthly rhythm, six appearances a year if maintained without interruption, suited a fiction magazine. Unlike a news weekly, Ficción did not chase events; unlike an annual, it maintained a continuous presence in bookshops and kiosks and a continuous relationship with subscribers who expected new stories at regular intervals. Whether the rhythm was maintained without interruption for the whole run is a question the hemeroteca holdings would answer; the directory record states the magazine as bimonthly, and this profile reports that characterisation without embellishing it into a verified issue-by-issue chronology.

Its readership, by the nature of its contents, was the literary public of Buenos Aires and of the Argentine interior reached by the capital's distribution: readers of contemporary fiction, students and teachers of literature, and the writers themselves, for whom a fiction magazine was both a market and a mirror. That such a public sustained a specialised bimonthly from 1956 to 1973 is consistent with everything known about mid-century Argentine reading culture, one of the most developed in the Spanish-speaking world.

Closure in 1973

Ficción ceased publication in 1973. The sources used for this profile establish the closing year without documenting a specific cause, and no cause is invented here. The year itself was a hinge in Argentine history: elections, the return of Peronism to power and the rapid approach of the violence and dictatorship of the later 1970s transformed the conditions under which every Argentine magazine operated. Many titles of the postwar literary expansion ended in those years. Ficción's seventeen-year run had already made it one of the longer-lived literary magazines of its generation, longer than Contorno, longer than most of the reviews founded in the same decade.

No revival of Ficción under Goyanarte or Editorial Goyanarte is recorded in the sources used, and the title should be catalogued as a closed historical magazine.

What the record does and does not show

For transparency, the verified record for Ficción is restated here in full. Verified: the name Ficción; the city, Buenos Aires; the founder, Juan Goyanarte; the publisher, Editorial Goyanarte; the founding, May 1956; the closing, 1973; the frequency, bimonthly; and the character, a literary magazine of fiction, literature and the arts showcasing Argentine and translated short fiction. Not verified in the sources consulted: named contributors and their stories, issue totals, circulation, design and price history, and the internal editorial succession, if any, after its founder. Research in Argentine hemerotecas, above all the holdings recorded for Buenos Aires periodicals, is the proper route to extend the record, and this profile is written so that such research can be added to it without contradiction.

That thinness should not be mistaken for insignificance. Argentina produced hundreds of literary magazines in the twentieth century, most of them far shorter-lived and far less completely recorded than Ficción. A bimonthly that survived from 1956 to 1973, under its own publishing house, devoted to the short story in the capital of the short story, has a defined and creditable place in the directory on the strength of its verified facts alone.

Legacy

Ficción's legacy is that of a durable home for narrative at mid-century: nearly two decades in which Argentine and translated short fiction reached readers together, in a Buenos Aires magazine published by its founder's own house. It represents, in this directory, the fiction magazine as a type, distinct from the critical review represented by Contorno, the cultural journal represented by Punto de Vista and the popular selection magazine represented by Leoplan, and the completeness of Argentine magazine history requires that type to be present with its best-documented example.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are these: Ficción, Buenos Aires, founded May 1956 by Juan Goyanarte, published by Editorial Goyanarte, bimonthly magazine of fiction, literature and the arts presenting Argentine and translated short fiction, closed 1973.