Literary Modernism in the Tropics

2010-03-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

I. Consuming Tradition with "el siempre goloso" Lezama Lima (1910 - 1976)

II. The Stateless Rey: "Estoy en el aire..."

Before Night Falls, Central Divisions:

i. Childhood and the emergence of the tellurian motif. The most poetic section of Arenas biography: mother-earth, the mother, Cuba-as-mother, "eating earth," water, rain, mud, etc.

ii. Persecution and internal "S/exile" in Castro's Cuba

iii. The literal illness becomes a metaphor for creativity stunted before his literal death (he commits suicide in December 1990 in NYC)

III. Modernism or "Tilting at Windmills" with Rey

A. Of Windmills and Power:
The phrase "Tilting at Windmills" derives from an episode in the novel _Don Quixote_ (1605/1615) by Miguel de Cervantes. In the novel, Don Quixote fights windmills that he imagines to be giants. Quixote sees the windmill blades as the giant's arms, for instance. Here is the relevant portion of the novel:

"Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, 'Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.'

What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.

'Those you see over there,' replied his master, 'with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.'

'Take care, sir,' cried Sancho. 'Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone.'"

-Part 1, Chapter VIII. Of the valourous Don Quixote's success in the dreadful and never before imagined Adventure of the Windmills, with other events worthy of happy record.

IV. Modernism's Lure

Centers: London, Paris, and the "periphery," Havana

Modernism: Refers to art and literature of the early 20th century

Canonical Versions from the Anglophone Tradition and from the Tropics

Novel: Late novels of Henry James (1843 - 1916) / José Lezama Lima (1910-1976)

Poetry: T.S. Elliot (1888-1965: poetry should be “Autotelic,” it should be an end in and of itself / Rubén Darío (1867 – 1916)

Prose: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) / Lydia Cabrera (1899 - 1991)

Characteristics (canonical)

1. An obsession with arts autonomy, “Art for Arts Sake” (Elliot’s autotelic poem)

2. Sense of Crisis, a radical break from culture. A sense that the foundations of culture are being overturned.

3. Paradigm of artistic experience should be the norm. “Norms” for everyone should be artistic: deep reflection, intensified perception.

4. Rejection of convention, especially sexual convention.

5. Artist as technician. Art has no message nor can it encompass personal expression because “true” art is ecumenical.

6. Joseph Frank. Radical break with spatial form. Rather than linear (“realist” narrative), motifs become the organizing principle of aesthetic works along with “referentiality.” Art as “difficult” and only visible upon re-reading. “The knight’s move.” (The question of difficulty is often understood/translated in Latin American literary contexts as the “neo-baroque.”)

7. “Modernism” is self- consciously international, and ecumenical.

8. Artist as exile.

V. El Rey's Afterlives: Referentiality as Performance

VI. Antecedents: Tobacco and Sugar

Wilfredo Lam (1902-1982), "La jungla" (1943)

Local Modernities

Fernando Ortíz Fernández (1881- 1969)

Pablo Picasso's (1881–1973), "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907)

Queer Latinidad: Reinaldo Arenas' _Before Night Falls_ (1992)

Literary Modernism in the Tropics