Pursuit of the "New Man" in Edmundo Desnoes' Memories of Underdevelopment

PURSUIT OF THE “NEW MAN” IN EDMUNDO DESNOES’ MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT by Al Schaller Wilmington College UNDERDEVELOPMENT is a disease, a collective brain disorder marked by political and social atrophy. One of its most insidious behaviors is mimicry, according to Edmundo Desnoes (Punto de vista 103): the failure to exercise one’s analytical or critical abilities that might uniquely stamp one’s life or advance the progress of society. To casually usurp the powers of the oppressor or submit to prevailing customs, styles and expectations is to consent to moral lethargy and corrode our singular humanity. In the fever of the Cuban revolution, Desnoes wrote in 1967: We must decolonialize and assert our standing on the world. Expose the danger of mimicry, delve into our social conduct in all its aspects, understand our social, racial and sexual prejudices, consider the individual while the political leaders are preoccupied with the whole of society, live to explore and not to sloganeer (Punto de vista 104).1 With this statement the author clearly identifies the thematic purpose that drives his classic 1965 novel, Memories of Underdevelopment: to probe and understand the social behaviors that retard the development of human consciousness. In exploring the psychology of underdevelopment, Desnoes’ novel turns its critical eye on the revolution itself, putting to the test Che Guevara’s socialist ambition of constructing a “new man” in Cuba. Against Guevara’s vision of Cuba’s masses marching in lockstep with its “vanguard” leaders to build a new social consciousness (Guevara, “Man and Socialism” 392-3), Desnoes pits the 93 Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and his individualized concept of the “new man.” Beneath the surface of the novel an unspoken dialogue between Guevara and Ortega informs the reflections of its narrator, the bourgeois misanthrope Malabre, and the surface turmoil of the revolution. Ortega had also lived through revolutionary times. Three horrific European wars confirmed for him the bankruptcy of modern man’s belief in science and “pure” reason, his faith that man “can suppress realities and build the world to his liking in the name of an idea” (Man and Crisis 216). From the rubble of the ideologies of his day, Ortega raised an alternative notion, “razón vital,” reason battling for survival in a perilous and shadowy world (84). Man is not an “unfinished product,” as Che would have it (Man and Socialism 390), nor an intricate “machine” by Malabre’s estimation; man is for Ortega the living, vital “drama ” of his life (Man and Crisis 38, 73). He is action tempered by the vigilance of thought; thought “made virile by its relation to action” (Man and People 29). Nor is thought innate in man but “a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition ” constantly threatened with abandonment (27). “Man is never surely man,” Ortega writes; “man lives in perpetual danger of being dehumanized” (25). In addition to the perils of the natural world, our own creations dehumanize us with their rigid architecture and residue of social habits even as they enable our survival (269). Diminished by the power and complexity of society, we grovel in its pleasures or cower beneath its crushing weight; we seek comfort in compliance, safety in our insular exclusion, paring our lives in the extreme to a single peripheral element of reality (Man and Crisis 145). We plunge back into nature – patriots and zealots, sybarites and cynics – barbarians again. For Ortega, the new man must be sought, not in the dogmas of rational idealism or religious faith or existential doubt, but in vigilant thought prepared to “face the universe in the live flesh” (Man and Crisis 101). “I have been and in many ways I still am a colonial of Western literature,” Desnoes confesses in his 1967 essay. “I still feel torn between an image of man as a meaningless creature, with only his pleasure, his anguish and his day-today existence and the intuition that man can be different, transcendent, that the new man is possible” (Punto de vista 101-2). If in Desnoes’ novel the “new man” proves elusive to Malabre, and Cuba’s assault on history stumbles in its enthusiasm, Memories of Underdevelopment probes with fierce detachment their yearning for identity...