The Great Latin American Novel by Carlos Fuentes

Author:Carlos Fuentes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

3. COUNTERCONQUEST AND BAROQUE

The epiphanies in Paradiso occur by means of a departure for the distant world of the “realist” stage, a direct transit from the order of causality to the order of what is hidden, latent, possible or forgotten, that aesthetic of intuition of which Guillermo Sucre speaks. It is a poetic path, arduous at times, but one which obeys the writer’s profound conviction: cultures are his imagination. Lezama Lima suggests that we divert the emphasis placed on the history of cultures in favor of “imaginary eras.” What is understood by this? “If a culture,” he writes in The Bewitched Quantity, “does not manage to create some kind of imagination,” it will become, with the passage of time, “brutally indecipherable.” For that reason, he proposes a history of humanity “divided by eras corresponding to their potential to create images.”

In The American Expression—one of the great explorations of our continent’s culture, along with those written by Sarmiento, Reyes, Martínez Estrada, and Mariátegui—Lezama imagines the times of Ibero-Indo-African America following their incarnation in the Pre-Hispanic myths, the “double astonishment” of the Conquest, the colonial Baroque, the “calaboose” of independence and the popular culture of the nineteenth century. As I have mentioned, Lezama observes a succession from the indigenous storyteller to the Spanish chronicler, and from this the Baroque señor, the exiled romantic and the master of the landed estate. But the nineteenth century fixation on this last element is set in motion once again by popular culture: the Mexican charro, the Argentine gaucho: chattered and gossiped about, celebrated in story and song, in corridos—popular ballads—that are recorrido—sung and told over and over again, far and wide—culminating in a new image: the work of José Guadalupe Posada, who in turn announces another new movement, still without name, because it is ours, the name for what we are now.

Julio Ortega is correct when he calls Lezama “the least traumatized theorist of Latin American culture, which he understood as a solution of continuities, always as a realization, never as a problem.” But Lezama’s sense of continuity is quite distinct from remoteness or a non-definition. Quite the contrary; it means an effective, corporeal, dynamic approach to each phase of the cultural continuity or “imaginary eras” of our lands. But these same adjectives already indicate to us that, among all these moments of the imagination, Lezama is most addicted to one, the Baroque, and he employs it not only as an intellectual preference but more precisely as a form of his artistic creation.

In the end, both reference and form are reunited because Lezama is also a Catholic writer, and if his Baroque aesthetic demands an artistic incarnation, it simultaneously demands moral, philosophical, and spiritual reason. Immersed in the Catholic civilization of Spanish America (Counter-Reformist and closed to modernity), Lezama searches with lucid desperation for a way out, closer than the insipidity of pious Catholicism and holy cards, beyond our contemporary identification of modernity with Protestant capitalism, even as we cover ourselves, nonetheless, with a cape of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.