Literatura y sociedad en América Latina: El Modernismo (review)

reviews 143 in Macao, opium is the opiate of the people, lean forgive that somewhat hokey "opiate ofthe people.".But Dalton's Spanish doesnt say nunca, never; it says no siempre, not always. And on this everything, dialectically speaking, hinges, because religion is still sometimes, Dalton wants to say, indeed an opium of the masses, but other times, when it takes the side of the exploited and oppressed, it can be an organizational and ideological force for liberation from imperialist bondage and Ulusion (Macao's "real" opium). Schaafs selection, whUe not generous, is fairly representative of Dalton's career, especially of the poems written between 1973 and 1975 while he was active in the ERP underground which were collected posthumously under the title Poemas clandestinos (Clandestine Poems). It's—for me—a bit on the reverential side, a bit too much the martyred hero of solidarity movement hagiography. There are too many ofthe obvious Dalton poems—like "Headaches"—which have already appeared in English. I suppose this is okay for the first-time reader, but it leaves a more quirky and inventive side of Dalton out. For example, among my favorite Daltons are his prose poems, which function on a kind of zany Groucho-Karl parodie sodaUst-reaUst logic. It's here that Dalton gets most ambitious and virtuosic as a writer and also most funny. But Schaaf prefers the severely didactic Dalton of the Brecht-Uke epigrams and satires, and includes not a single prose poem. Or again, Dalton has a whole series of "war between the sexes" poems—some of the best dealing with the woman he lived with in Czechoslovakia— which are laceratingly—albeit "self-critically"—misogynistic. Neverthdess, they say more about sexual politics and possibilities in the struggle than the more conventional pieties of the "women's question" poems Schaaf does include, like "For A Better Love." These are minor quibbles: Schaafs is a very necessary book that everybody—not just literati—involved in the movement should read. Dalton's poetry is both about the movement and for movement activists: us. But I'd also Uke to see more and different sides of Dalton in English, warts, broken nose, "ugly words," machismo, party hack and prankster and all. After all, Dalton would be the first to note that to expect the revolutionary to be a kind of Robert Redford is a kind of ultraleftism. JOHN BEVERLEY Françoise Perus. Literatura y sociedad en América Latina: El Modernismo. La Habana: Casa de las Americas, 1976. 149 pp. Caught by surprise by this book the average student of Latin American Uterature might feel tempted to ask: What, another study on Modernism? In a way such a question is indeed valid, for the critical bibliography on the poetic movement initiated by Rubén Darío has grown to gigantic proportions. What the rductant reader should realize immediatdy is that Françoise Pénis has not written just "another" analysis of Modernism but a most thorough and profound Marxist interpretation of it, one that solidly complements Angel Rama's memorable book, Rubén Daríoy el modernismo (circunstancia socioeconómica de un arte americano) (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1970). Furthermore, as Penis notes in her Introduction, this is the first ofa three volume project in which she will examine, in addition to Modernism, the sodai novd of 1910-1950, and the new narrative that emerged during the 60's. Basically, Pénis is telling us that these three literary currents correspond to significant moments in the sodai and economic devdopment of Latin Amereia. To wit: Modernism is a Uterary response to the adoption of a capitalist mode of production inserted into a new worldwide capitalist-imperialist project; 144 the minnesota review the social novel grows out of a period of deep crisis for the oligarchic system of economic development; and the new narrative is the literary byproduct of industrialization and urbanization within an increasingly conflictive relationship between local and imperialistic interests . Perus is emphatic in defining her position as a critic: "I bdieve that any abstract reflection on the criteria to evaluate literature is nothing more than a perpetual tautology ifwe do not begin by establishing precisely what...