Painting Modernism

Chapter Four: Facing the Orient

5 3 4 Facing the Orient In desultory notes, paralleling Jules Michelet’s statement that “the Orient advances, invincible, fatal to the gods of light by the charm of its dreams, by the magic of its chiaroscuro” (quoted by Said, 73), José Martí, declared that “the Orient invades the West” (El Oriente invade el Occidente) (1963–1973, 19: 359) not merely in the context of nineteenth-century discursive practice, including ekphrastic textualizations, but as a sign of hybridity in the evolution of the interplay of East-West culture. In reexamining Spanish American modernist texts that span the years 1880 to 1930 and in which the Orient is inscribed, in this chapter we will argue that 1) there is a need to question the perpetuation of previous critical positions with regard to the meaning of Orientalism in modernist literature; and 2) that the revisioning of modernism’s Orientalisms implies a fundamentally dynamic project in which the nineteenth-century’s desire for the Orient should be viewed not simply “as an intertextual phenomenon but . . . as a social phenomenon” (Behdad, 136), a visualization process that is scripted into a network of heterogeneous cultural representations generated by the forces of both authority and aesthetics. Furthermore, if we prefer to speak of Orientalisms rather than Orientalism it is because of the heterogeneous, polyphonic nature of a discourse referring to both Near and Far East whose basic operational meaning we appropriate from Edward Said: “Orientalism [he insists] is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery, and practice” (73). In the course of this process of learning, discovery, and practice the Spanish American modernists were drawn to the representations of the 5 4 PA I N T I N G M O D E R N I S M Orient they encountered in their readings of classical and nineteenthcentury texts (principally French) and reproductions of Oriental art. With respect to readings, an insight into their contemporary archive can be gleaned from a narration by Abel Morán, the protagonist of Efrén Rebolledo ’s short novel Hojas de bambú (Bamboo leaves). Morán had read the Book of Wonders in which the master Marco Polo spoke for the first time of distant Cipango [China], goading, with his vivid descriptions the studies of wise men and at the same time feeding the greed of the conquerors . . . ; the studies on Japanese Art of Edmund de Goncourt and Gonse . . . ; the novels of Loti . . . ; the Japanese Histories, by the magnificent Lafcadio Hearns, each one of whose lines is a gem of literature.1 (el Libro de las maravillas, en que Maese Marco Polo habló por primera vez del distante Cipango, aguijoneando, con sus vívidas descripciones, la aplicación de los sabios a la par que la codicia de los conquistadores. . . . los estudios sobre el Arte Japonés de Edmundo de Goncourt y de Gonse . . . ; las novelas de Loti . . . ; las Historias japonesas, cada una de cuyas líneas es una joya de literatura.) (178) Inspired by these and other cultural readings, instead of directing his steps toward the more traditional choice of exploring Europe, Morán preferred to feast his eyes, firsthand, on prototypical Oriental visions: “cricket cages and dwarf pines, houses made of paper and geishas with colorful kimonos and dark hair buns, temples of red lacquer, the graceful Fujiyama and Japanese natural settings of blue skies and twisted trees” (178). It was the lure of exotic scenery, fueled by the sense of an ending that moved him and other protagonists to examine the Orient: that is, an awareness that tourism and European colonialism had already turned what was exotic into the familiar. Thus, as Behdad notes, the belated travel writers and literary artists of the nineteenth century, filled with the desire to explore alternative horizons, other cultures, and cognitive systems, frustrated in their desire to capture an authentic Other, produced melancholy discourses, texts signifying an absence, frequently taking as present what in fact had already vanished (92). This loss of the past is inserted in many forms in modernist texts; we find it, for example, in Martí’s Versos sencillos (1963–1973, 16: 120), framed in the symbolic statement of Agar’s frustrated search for her lost pearl. Or FA C I N G T H E O R I E N T 5 5 in Gómez Carrillo’s polarized vision of Damascus, which, much to...