All Roads Led to Paris: Journey of a dream

For Latin American writers, Paris is an old story. It used to seem, long ago, as if one could touch the oracle simply by going there, walking the streets covered by Baudelaire, Proust, and others. So went the myth of literary destiny.

After all, Paris was the place where Vallejo wrote most of his poems, where Asturias with Leyendas de Guatemala and Lydia Cabrera with Cuentos negros began their careers. After the war Paz wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude while working at the Mexican embassy there. Later, in No One Writes to the Colonel, García Márquez went on dreaming of Macondo, waiting for a distant paycheck, and the young Vargas Llosa achieved success with The Time of the Hero. And Cortázar, of course, enshrined the city as a unique site of exaltation and breakdown in Hopscotch.

Let there be no doubt: innumerable and significant are the works authored by Latin Americans in Paris since then. As in everything else in recent decades, however, where once there appeared to be a center, dispersal has gradually prevailed. At least a generation ago the French capital lost its primacy among Spanish American writers—despite its importance as an influence for Brazilian writers, few took up long residency there—nor is it any longer the near-obligatory place of pilgrimage. Nonetheless, if the myth of Paris has faded, the story still continues.

But how did it begin?

In early-nineteenth-century Spanish America the first generations of writers after independence sought to articulate their new identities as separate from those of their former rulers. Though their language and education were European, they themselves were American: it would take a full century before the implications of that difference were really understood. These writers had no models by which to know themselves; they knew of no situation analogous to their own. The circumstances from which the United States had arisen came the closest, but its history of settlement and expansion and its own relationship to Europe were too divergent from theirs to afford a parallel.

There was also the problem of developing an audience, guided not by the old European tastes but by new, as yet undefined values, to appreciate and nurture this American writing. Due to their legacy of colonial dependence, the countries of Spanish America communicated less with each other than with the capitals of Europe. As late as the 1960s, José Donoso has noted, writers were often unaware of what was written in neighboring countries, because the books were not available to them. The means of distribution and contact whereby writers and readers could truly learn about each other across the continent were inadequate.

The French Revolution had helped inspire the struggles for independence in Latin America. Thus Paris attracted these writers both because of the fresh ideas it held for their task and because it offered a favorable climate in which to explore them. European romanticism provided the first cue, starting with the poet Esteban Echeverría when he returned to Argentina in 1830 after five years in Paris. According to Pedro Henríquez Ureña, this “spiritual revolution opened to every national or regional group the road to self-expression, to the full revelation of its soul, in contrast with the cold ultrarational universality of academic classicism,” itself a colonial remnant. “As a rule the movement came from France,” which “had become for us the main source or else the channel of modern culture.” By midcentury romanticism had spread throughout Latin America as writers began to concentrate on national themes.

At the same time, urban intellectuals still looked to Europe for guidance. Paris, representing the best of Europe, became the ultimate place for rounding out a person’s education. By the late nineteenth century their prosperity had enabled many upper-class Spanish American families to stay in Paris for entire seasons or longer. They adopted French values as a barometer of elegance and imported prestigious French art products. During this period, the rise of the Parnassian poets (Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, the Cuban-born Heredia, Verlaine, Mallarmé) shaped a...