NOTE: This paper was read at a series of lectures organized by the Seneca publishing house to commemorate the fourth centenary of the birth of Saint John of the Cross.
A Literature of Foundations.
[PARIS, 1961].
Is there such a thing as Spanish American literature? Since the end of the last century it has been said that our letters are a branch from the Spanish trunk. Nothing is more true, if we are speaking only of language. Mexicans, Argentines, Cubans, Chileans-all of us Spanish Americans write in Spanish. Essentially our language is no different from that which is written in Andalusia, Castile, Aragon, or Estremadura. It is well known that there is greater linguistic unity in the Americas than in Spain. It could not be otherwise: we never experienced the Middle Ages. We were born at the dawn of modern times and the Castilian that reached our sh.o.r.es was a language that had already arrived at universality and maturity. If there is anything lacking in American Spanish, it is the particularities of the Middle Ages. True, we have created others, but there is no danger that the particularities of Argentine or Central American speech will give birth to distinct languages. Although Spanish is not eternal-no language is-it will last as long as the other modern languages: we live the same history as the Russians, French, or English. But the language that Spanish Americans speak is one thing and the literature they write is another. The branch has grown so much that it is now as big as the trunk. Actually, it is another tree. A different tree, with greener leaves and a more bitter sap. The birds nesting in its boughs are unknown in Spain.
Spanish American literature or literatures? If we open a book on the history of Ecuador or Argentina, we find a chapter dedicated to the nation"s literature. But nationalism is not only a moral aberration; it is also an aesthetic fallacy. Nothing distinguishes the literature of Argentina from that of Uruguay, the literature of Mexico from that of Guatemala. Literature is broader than frontiers. It is true that the problems of Chile are not those of Colombia and that a Bolivian Indian has little in common with a Negro of the Antilles. But the multiplicity of situations, races, and landscapes does not deny the unity of our language and culture. Unity is not uniformity. Our literary groups, styles, and tendencies do not coincide with our political, ethnic, or geographic divisions. There are no national schools or styles; on the contrary, there are families, lineages, spiritual or aesthetic traditions, universals. Chilean poetry and the Argentine novel are geographic labels; but realism, creationism, criollismo, and the other aesthetic and intellectual tendencies are not. Our artistic movements are born in this or that country, of course; if they are genuinely fecund, they quickly leap the frontiers and put down roots in other lands. In addition, the present political geography of Latin America is deceptive. Its multiplicity of nations is the result of circ.u.mstances and calamities that are remote from the reality of our peoples. Latin America is a continent artificially dismembered by a conjunction of native oligarchies, military bosses, and foreign imperialism. If these forces disappear (and they are going to disappear), the boundaries will be different. The very existence of a Spanish American literature is one of the proofs of the historical unity of our nations.
A literature is always born facing a historical reality, often despite that reality. Spanish American literature is no exception to this rule. Its exceptional character resides in the fact that the reality against which it contends is a Utopia. Our literature is the response of the real reality of Americans to the Utopian reality of America. Before having our own historical existence, we began by being a European idea. We cannot be understood if it is forgotten that we are a chapter in the history of European Utopias. It is not necessary to go back to More or Campanella to prove the Utopian nature of America. It is enough to recall that Europe is the fruit-in some ways involuntary-of European history, whereas we are its premeditated creation. For many centuries Europeans did not know they were Europeans, and only when Europe was a historical reality did they suddenly realize it, realize that they pertained to something vaster than their native cities. And even today it is not certain thar Europeans feel themselves to be Europeans: they know it, but that is very different from feeling it. In Europe, reality preceded the name. America, on the other hand, began by being an idea. A victory for nominalism: the name engendered the reality. The American continent had not yet been wholly discovered when it had already been baptized. The name they gave us condemned us to being a new world. A land choosing its future: before being, America already knew what it would be. As soon as he reached our sh.o.r.es the European immigrant lost his historical reality: he ceased to have a past and was changed into a projectile aimed at the future. For more than three centuries the word "American" designated a man who was defined not by what he had done but by what he would do. A person who has no past, only a future, is a person with little reality. Americans: men of little reality, men of little weight. Our name condemns us to being the historical project of a foreign consciousness: the Europeans.
From its very beginnings Anglo-Saxon America was a Utopia on the go. The Spanish and Portuguese Americas were constructions outside of time. In both cases: the abrogation of the present. Eternity and the future, heaven and progress, all deny today and its reality, the humble evidence of each day"s sun. And here our resemblance to the Anglo-Saxons ends. We are children of the Counter Reformation and the Spanish empire; they are children of Luther and the Industrial Revolution. Therefore they breathe easily in the rarefied atmosphere of the future. And for the same reason they are not in close touch with reality. The so-called realism of the Anglo-American is pragmatism-an operation that consists in lightening the compact materiality of things in order to change them into process. Reality ceases to be a substance and is transferred into a series of acts. Nothing is permanent because action is the favored form that reality a.s.sumes. Each act is instantaneous; in order to prolong itself it has to change, to become another act. The Spanish and Portuguese Americas were founded by a civilization that conceived of reality as a stable substance; human, political, or artistic actions had no other object than to crystallize in works. These works, as embodiments of the will for permanence, are designed to resist change. When I hear it said that Whitman is the great poet of American reality I shrug my shoulders. His reality is the desire to touch something real. Whitman"s poetry is hungry for reality. And hungry for communion: it goes from no man"s land to every man"s land. Saxon America suffers from a hunger for being. Its pragmatism is an always unrealizable Utopia and that is why it ends up as nightmare. It does not seek the reality of the senses, what the eyes see and the hands touch, but rather the multiplication of the image in the mirror of action; it changes reality but does not touch or enjoy it. The nomadism of the Anglo-Americans-a shot aimed at the future, an arrow that never reaches the target-is not spatial but temporal: the land they walk is a future land.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Spanish American literature ceased to be a reflection of Spanish literature. The Modernist poets suddenly broke with the Spanish models. But they did not turn their eyes toward their own lands; instead, they looked toward Paris. They were in search of the present. The first Spanish American poets to be aware of their own selves and their historical singularity were a generation of exiles. Those who could not get away invented Babylons and Alexandrias according to their resources and their fantasies. It was a literature of evasion and, at the same time, an attempt to fuse with modern life, to recover the present. They wanted to be up to date, to be in the universal mainstream. Our portion of the New World was an old, locked house, half convent, half barracks. The first thing to be done: knock down the walls, wake up the sleepers, clear the specters from their minds. (Those phantasms were, and are, very real: a stubborn past that would not go away unless it was rooted up by force.) If the exorcisms of the Modernist poets did not dissipate the specters, at least they let in the light. We could see the world: we were at the beginning of the twentieth century. We had to make haste. Among the exiles there were some who turned their eyes toward Spanish American reality: was there something, outside that Spanish past, at once grandiose and immobilized? Some poets, more through imagination than memory, glimpsed an immense natural world and the ruins of brilliant and cruel civilizations lost among jungles and volcanoes. The literature of evasion soon became a literature of exploration and return. The true adventure was in America.
Almost always the road to Palenque or Buenos Aires went by way of Paris. The experience of those poets and writers reveals that in order to return to our home we must first dare to abandon it. Only the prodigal son returns. To reproach Spanish American literature for its rootlessness is to ignore the fact that only this rootlessness permitted us to recover our portion of reality. Distance had to precede discovery. Distance, and also the mirages it created-it is not harmful to feed on illusions if we transform them into realities. One of our mirages was the natural world of America; another, the Indian past. Now, nature is no more than a point of view: the eyes that behold it and the will that alters it. Landscapes are poetry or history, vision or work. Our lands and cities took on a real existence as soon as our poets and novelists named them. The same thing did not occur with our Indian past. On the one hand, our Indians are not past but present-a present that breaks in on us. On the other hand, they are not nature, they are human realities. Indigenous literature in its two aspects-the ornamental and the didactic, the archaeological and the apostolic-has failed doubly, as artistic creation and as social preachment. Much the same can be said of Negro literature. There are Indian and Negro writers in Spanish America who are among our best, but they do not write of but from their condition. One of the most impressive works of our contemporary letters is an anthropological doc.u.ment: the autobiographical narrative of Juan Perez Jolote, an Indian of Chiapas.
The rootlessness of Spanish American literature is not accidental; it is the consequence of our history, of our having been founded as a European idea. But, having a.s.sumed it fully, we went beyond it. When Ruben Daro wrote Cantos de vida y esperanza [Songs of life and hope] he was not a Spanish American writer who had discovered the modern spirit: he was a modern spirit who had discovered Spanish American reality. This is what distinguishes us from the Spaniards. Antonio Machado believed that a Spanish work could be universal only by first being profoundly Spanish; Juan Ramn Jimenez called himself "the universal Andalusian." Spanish American literature unfolds in the opposite way: we do not think that Argentine literature is universal; however, we believe that some works of universal literature are Argentine. What is more, we have discovered, thanks to our rootlessness, a buried tradition: the ancient indigenous literatures. The influence of Nahuatl poetry on various Mexican poets has been very profound, but perhaps those poets would not have recognized themselves in those texts, at once restrained and delirious, if they had not undergone the experience of Surrealism or, in the case of Ruben Bonifaz Nuo, of Latin poetry. Is it not significant that the translator of Virgil is also one of those who has best understood the "modern" qualities of indigenous poetry? And, in the same way, Neruda had to write Tentativa del hombre infinito [Attempt of the infinite man], a Surrealist exercise, before arriving at his Residencia en la tierra [Residence on earth]. What is that earth? It is American and at the same time it is Calcutta, Colombo, Rangoon. One could add many other examples: the novels of Bioy Casares and Cortzar, the poems of Lezama Lima and Cintio Vitier . . . But that is not necessary: a book by the Argentine poet Enrique Molina is ent.i.tled Costumbres errantes o la redondez de la tierra [Errant customs or the roundness of the earth].
A return is not a discovery. What have Spanish American writers discovered? Almost all of Borges"s work-and I am thinking not only of his prose but also of many of his poems-postulates the nonexistence of America. Borges"s Buenos Aires is as unreal as his Babylons and Ninevehs. Those cities are metaphors, nightmares, syllogisms. What is that metaphor saying, what is that dream dreaming? Another dream, named Borges. And that dream? Another. In the beginning, someone dreams; if he wakes up, the dreamed reality disappears. Under pain of death we are condemned to dream a Buenos Aires where a Borges is dreaming. This poet"s works postulate not only the nonexistence of America but also the inevitability of its invention. Or to say it in another way: Spanish American literature is an enterprise of the imagination. We are resolved to invent our own reality: the light at four o"clock in the morning on a greenish wall in the outskirts of Bogot; the vertiginous fall of darkness on the city of Santo Domingo (in a house in the center of town a revolutionary awaits the arrival of the police); the hour of high tide on the coast of Valparaso (a girl undresses and discovers solitude and love); the cruel noonday in a village in Mexico"s state of Jalisco (a farm hand has dug up a pre-Conquest sculpture; tomorrow he will go to the city; an unknown woman is awaiting him there, and a journey . . .). To invent reality or to rescue it? Both. Reality recognizes itself in the imaginings of poets-and poets recognize their imaginings in reality. Our dreams are waiting for us around the corner. Spanish American literature, which is rootless and cosmopolitan, is both a return and a search for tradition. In searching for it, it invents it. But invention and discovery are not terms that best describe its purest creations. A desire for incarnation, a literature of foundations.
L.K.
end.