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MLN 119.2 (2004) 344-362



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"A Reminiscent Memory":
Lezama, Zoé Valdés, and Rilke's Island

Isabel Alvarez Borland
College of the Holy Cross


Island: a splitting; rupture; i-so-la-tion: fearful loneliness. Island: a blank page. Island: the garden of the tapestries of The Virgin and the Unicorn.
Julieta Campos, The Fear of Losing Eurydice
Como decía Nietzsche, "el que vuelve a los orígenes encontrará orígenes nuevos."
José Lezama Lima, Interrogando a Lezama Lima

A magnificent example of aesthetic response to a visual work of art occurs in Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) when Malte, the fictional writer in the novel, visits the Cluny Museum in Paris and registers his impressions of the Gothic tapestry series, "La dame à la licorne" (111-13). In 1997, almost a century later, Cuban expatriate Zoé Valdés re-enacts a similar scene of aesthetic response in her novel, Café Nostalgia. In a context and tone that closely recalls Rilke's original scene, Valdés's immigrant protagonist, Marcela, encounters the Cluny tapestries and describes the images of "The Lady and the Unicorn" to the reader (330-35). One by one, and referring to their original names: "La vue" 'Sight,' "L'ouie" 'Hearing,' "L'odorat" 'Smell,' "Le goût" 'Taste,' "Le toucher" 'Touch,' and, "A mon seul désir" 'To my only désire,' the Cluny tapestries are evoked by Marcela in their color and texture. At that narrative juncture, it does not surprise us that the last segment of Café Nostalgia is titled after the sixth tapestry, "To My Only Desire" 'A mi único deseo,' and that the names [End Page 344] of the remaining panels also figure within the chapter titles of the novel. Rilke's rendition of a writer's displacement, re-created in the nomadic life of young Malte Laurids Brigge, becomes the focus of Valdés's reading of The Notebooks and provides the author with a model for her fragmented story of emigration.

In Café Nostalgia, Paris and Havana establish a counterpoint that allows the reader an understanding of two spaces and simultaneous time frames. The present in Paris closely resembles Valdés's own story of exile, whereas the past narrates Marcela's childhood and adolescence in Havana. Sensorial memory evokes Marcela's remembrances as she jumps in a Proustian manner, from present to past and from Paris to Havana using as bridges familiar sounds, sensations, tastes, and smells. The novel is in fact two separate stories. The first relates to the toils of Marcela, a Cuban immigrant trying to survive in the Paris of the 1990s, while the second provides a record of the protagonist's intellectual biography. Throughout the book, Marcela describes her literary preferences, Proust in particular, and how by reading his works she is able to reach her past, her country, and herself (16-18). Yet, even though the presence of Proust is explicit in each chapter of Café Nostalgia, Rilke's name and The Notebooks are never mentioned in the novel. How to explain this silence?

The present study considers Zoé Valdés's relationship to Rilke as a literary model and argues that the links between the two writers can be better understood when we examine Valdés's relationship to one of Cuba's best known poets, José Lezama Lima. It is my contention that Valdés's "reminiscent memory" of Rilke's tropes of dispersion are effected through a Lezamian prism that serves the author as an imaginary venue for the recovery of her Cuban tradition. Pertinent to my reading of Café Nostalgia are Lezama Lima's views on how writers assimilate and influence each other's images, what Lezama called in his 1941 essay on Julian del Casal, "una potencia de razonamiento reminiscente" 'the power of reminiscent memory' (Casal, 183).

Enrico Mario Santí, and later Gustavo Pellón, have studied how Lezama's concept of literary influence focused on the idea of resonance between writers and their images, a practice that, according to Lezama himself, would...

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