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CR: The New Centennial Review 2.2 (2002) 187-200



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Casey's Nineteenth Century and the Ciclón Project

Victor Fowler-Calzada
Translated by Jacqueline E. Loss
University of Connecticut


I INTEND TO BEGIN SPEAKING ABOUT THE GAZE THAT CALVERT CASEY CAST ON nineteenth-century Cuba in order to then examine the Ciclón project in greater depth. It is useful to look at them in light of one another, because, by beginning with Casey's fascination with the reverse of history, taking reverse to mean bringing to light the dark and the dirty, we open up a path toward making sense of the Ciclónproject. Casey wants to get to the bottom of what has been silenced in the nineteenth century. For instance, when he approaches the figure of Martí ("Diálogos de vida y muerte"), he feels attracted by the Maestro's obsession with death: "Flight, a modern psychiatrist would say, suicidal tendencies, self-destruction, duplicity of the ego or hate toward oneself. Everything is possible. We prefer to contrast the two tendencies to grasp the vision of a thinking mind of rare honesty and of an originality that impels greatly its tradition" (Memorias de una isla 1964, 18). When he writes about Ramón Meza ("Meza literato y los Croquis habaneros"), he starts by wanting to figure out which qualities make him the nineteenth-century Cuban novelist who approximates most a contemporary sensibility. However, he digresses from those textual questions in his attempt [End Page 187] to understand why the most promising figure within nineteenth-century prose loses his power and ends up as a banal and frustrated writer. If what interests him about these writers is the reverse of the text's evolution, the same happens when he approximates Carrión. In "Carrión o la desnudez," Casey is fascinated by the way in which the author's texts move us into another dimension of nineteenth-century Habanero society: the dirtiness of the zones that are distant from the pomp of a triumphant and recently constituted Republic. We can summarize with a question about what unifies the authorship: What's behind it? In a way, this is the same question that spurs on Casey's own writing. There, we follow him as he places characters in turbid situations, moments of loss of equilibrium in which the social barriers are broken down in the direction of the lowest strata of the human conglomerate: beggars, agonizing wretches, and limit instants, in which the border between life and death is traversed are all multiplied in his narrative.

The intention of Casey's gaze is revealed in his reading of the Carrión of the collection of stories La última voluntad. If he knows well that only "Inocencia" survives literarily, he does not pay attention to it, but rather to "El doctor Prisco," the one in which the homonymous character "dies alone, sitting on a chair on the Paseo de la Punta, one Sunday afternoon, while that promenade of the new Republic's nouveau riche spins in all its splendor" (1964, 50). Upon praising Carrión, Casey pours out such adjectives as "implacable," "accurate," "somber," and "cruel." He is admired for his ability to "see a lot," demonstrating the novelist's gaze, meaning his inclination to show us the reverse: "He sees the city covering itself in cosmetics and paintings in order to erase the stains and cover up the ugliness of its misery" (1964, 50). Because of the utter enthusiasm with which one paragraph of the text, in particular, is written, it becomes clear that it is really the program of a poetics consciously assumed by the critic as his own creative principle: "What surprises and satisfies us most, what makes him interesting to us is his absolute indifference in the face of the false values accepted by his epoch and in the face of dismal national enthusiasms. Where others saw the splendor, the richness or the promise of enormous riches, he saw the sordidness, the poverty, the parasitism, the crime, the...

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