Central American Avant-Garde Narrative: Literary Innovation and Cultural Change (1926–1936) by Adrian Taylor Kane (review)

Central-American avant-garde studies have primarily focused on poetry and manifestos (1), while narrative has been mainly ignored. Although several avant-garde works of fiction were published during the 1920s and 1930s, no Central American country other than Nicaragua had a coordinated avant-garde movement (2), which helps to explain why they have fallen through the cracks of literary history. In Central American Avant-Garde Narrative, Adrian Taylor Kane studies forgotten narratives by renowned Central American authors to demonstrate that this art movement was not only alive and well during those decades, but also incredibly important and influential.

The book has six chapters, an introduction that underlines the definition and history of Latin American vanguardism, four chapters with examples of avant-garde narratives from various Central American countries, and a brief conclusion that localizes these texts in a larger literary context.

In his introduction, Kane argues that while vanguardist Latin American authors were clearly influenced by their European peers, the movement was developed within unique cultures and situations and with its own objectives (13). Positivism, which in America gave place to dictatorships and racism, was confronted by artists who created their own versions of truth, undermining positivism’s “mimetic function of reality” and its predilection for logic and reason (20).

Maelstrom: Films Telescopiados, a novel by Guatemalan author Luis Cartoza y Aragón, used surrealism’s ludic elements to confront the mimetic aspects of positivism and traditional literature, since play, according to Phillip Lewis, possesses “destructive, corrective, or emancipatory” qualities (32). In Maelstrom, reality imitates art, which is the complete opposite of what realists and naturalists propose, and its surrealistic elements of play, dreams, the absurd, humor, and so on, challenged the reigning positivism (48).

Max Jiménez departed from his country’s traditional costumbrismo, which supported the ideologies of Costa Rica’s bourgeois ruling classes. Instead, he championed vanguardism with works such as his antinovel Unos fantoches (Some Puppets), with its unconventional and provocative form and plot, and El domador de pulgas (The Flees’ Tamer), a novel that is not as radical in its structure—and that, in fact, mimics the form of the traditional costumbrismo—but whose themes and content are as radical and critical of the literary, cultural, and political status quo as they can possibly be (64).

The influence of European vanguardism in America is explored in Guatemalan writer Flavio Herrera’s novel El tigre, which follows the typical structure of a criollista narrative, but the elements of vanguardism are not hard to find: surrealism, cubism and simultanism. The theme of barbarism versus civilization ends in a loss for the latter, an obvious attack on social positivism. Like Herrera, Panamanian author Rogelio Sinán’s two short stories also employ cubism, but while the Guatemalan novelist applies it to El tigre’s broken structure, Sinán depicts geometrical and fragmented images; this story as well as “El sueño de Serafín del Carmen” rely heavily upon surrealism. Kane argues that the three works analyzed are particularly important, since they would become standards and “vital contributors” to the continents’ vanguardism (96).

“La barba provisional” (“The Provisional Beard”), a short story by Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, although unknown, is the first attempt at experimentation and surrealism that would later become key elements in his work. Leyendas de Guatemala and El Señor Presidente show the evolution of his surrealism, which serves as a means to modernize his national culture “artistically, socially, and politically” (125) in order to undermine the damaging effects of positivism.

Adrian Taylor Kane’s thesis demonstrates that these vanguardist narratives might be rare, but are in fact immensely influential in the future modernist and postmodernist art of their respective nations. Their shock value strove to make readers doubt the absolute truth claims of positivism and to allow the possibility that the status quo wasn’t the only or the best way to accept reality. This volume adds a conversation...