Luis Cardoza y Aragón’s Pequeña sinfonía del Nuevo Mundo in the Context of Cubism and Surrealism

The key moment of the first section of Luis Cardoza y Aragón’s avant-garde novel Pequeña sinfonía del Nuevo Mundo presents the protagonist, a young poet named Dante, passing by the banks of New York’s Hudson River. He does not recognize his surroundings, as he has become lost in a city he does not know in the New World, a world that is new both in its distinction from the Old World of Europe and through its constant creation and rebirth. The world around him is generally vibrant, filled with trees and stones that talk to one another, and spaces that expand and collapse, which he can verbally manipulate. However, at this moment he finds that time has stopped and that the city has become emptied of people. It feels to him like a dead city. He attempts to speak but finds that he has lost his voice, and with it, the ability to create. The narrator explains:

Deseó, murmuró, gritó con voz lunar: “¡árboles, árboles!” Las palabras eran impotentes, no creaban, habían perdido su magia genésica. Morían en los labios; no existía el sonido. Quiso gritar de nuevo, articuló con toda su alma: “¡pájaros, pájaros!”

Un burbullón de espuma apareció en la boca, y ningún sonido en el aire muerto, tieso y estirado. ¡Ay! ¡Alondionicarasiodracol! Ya no comprendía el espacio, ya le era impotente hacer vibrar las palabras, ausente, extraño y enemigo a toda onda.

(29)

The solitude of the poet and the loss of identity within his surroundings severs the dynamic relationship he has with the world and with words. Instead of vitally intertwining with his environment, he is forced to merely respond to it.

This scene demonstrates the centrality of the figure of the poet to the world for Cardoza, though it likewise presents the idea of creation through a world that is anything but static. The Nuevo Mundo is a world that breaks from both logical reality and Cartesian consistency, often in fantastic and unanticipated ways. The novel was written between 1929 and 1932 (though not published until 1948), and presents one of the strongest examples of the use of avant-garde representations of space in Latin American literature, matched most closely by Panamanian author Rogelio Sinán’s 1931 short story “El sueño de Serafín del Carmen.” The dates of composition of Cardoza’s novel place it under the influence of European Surrealism, an influence Cardoza would acknowledge, though it is likewise grounded in the visual production of modernism in the 1920s, in particular the Constructivist and Futurist works of Kazimir Malevich, and the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Cardoza also references in his prologue the influence of the historical Dante, and of Federico García Lorca, whose Poeta en Nueva York was composed between 1929 and 1930, and whom he met in 1929 in Havana. The prologue likewise mentions the influence of Gérard de Nerval, and the work provides an epigraph from the French writer that includes the lines: “Je résolus de fixer le rêve et d’en connaître le secret,” and “Après un engourdissement de quelques minutes une vie nouvelle commence, affranchie des conditions du temps et de l’espace, et pareille sans doute à celle que nous attend après la mort” (11).¹ This quote is appropriate, as dream logic and the manipulation of space and time are central to Cardoza’s vision of the New World; these techniques unify the disparate spaces of the work, including New York City, Havana, Florence, Ancient Greece, Mayan Mesoamerica, as well as the Inferno of the Florentine Dante.

For Cardoza, this encompassing of the entirety of the world came as something of second nature, as his life found him traveling frequently between Europe and the Americas. He was born in Antigua Guatemala in 1904, making him one of the younger members of Guatemala’s “Generación del 20,” the group of writers who both loudly rejected the...