The Politics of Philology: Alfonso Reyes and the Invention of the Latin American Literary Tradition (review)

Before Carlos Fuentes, before Octavio Paz, and before Juan Rulfo, there was Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959). Reyes was the towering figure in Mexican letters of the first half of the twentieth century, and in the estimation of Borges, the best prose stylist then writing in Spanish. A poet, essayist, dramatist, Classical scholar, and diplomat, Reyes was also tireless champion of Mexican literature. His lifelong goal was to establish its place in "universal" culture; Fuentes once reminisced that Reyes taught him that Mexican literature was great not because it was Mexican, but because it was "Literature." It is strange then, that as his fellow regiomontano the contemporary novelist David Toscana has wittily acknowledged, today Reyes is very respected indeed but no one reads him. This neglect is perhaps due to three causes: the first is that, although he practiced all genres, Reyes' most important works were short belletristic essays on myriad topics. These delicate creatures, despite their gorgeous prose, often come across to the modern reader as period pieces. In general most of the critical attention they have received has been in the form of contextualizing literary history. A second reason is that Reyes wrote a lot of these essays. His collected works currently weigh in at twenty-four thick volumes, and any conscientious appreciation of his writing requires some serious study-time. A third and perhaps most significant reason is that (in the parlance of the "culture wars" of recent years) Reyes was a "Great Books" cultural conservative. His project to shape a Eurocentric Literary Canon can seem to contemporary readers as either artificial or elitist. Reyes saw, and believed in, a direct line of descent that stretched from Ancient Greece, through the Spanish Middle Ages and the Golden Age, to Latin America and Mexico, and by extension,to Alfonso Reyes himself. In the dusty hills of the Monterrey of his youth, he saw the dusty hills of Thermopylae.

Into the thin atmosphere of Reyes studies, I welcome a book like Robert Conn's The Politics of Philology. This work attempts something rarely done with Reyes' work: it charts out a synthetic and theoretical vision of Reyes' worldview. The book's central interest is Reyes' goal of establishing a Latin American "Aesthetic State," which he modeled on the Weimar of Goethe, Winckelmann, and Schiller. Conn's take on Reyes' utopian community of intellectuals differs with that of the established critics—Barbara Aponte, James Robb, Martin Stabb—who tend to cast Reyes as an above-the-fray ecumenist, as someone with a measured and unthreatening voice who was capable of inviting all differing points of view into his "civilized" community of the mind. (Reyes' personal warmth and intellectual generosity are still remembered today; Elena Poniatowska remembers him as "huggable.") Conn contends that those previous critics did not delve deeply enough, opting instead "to read for continuity and sameness," and thus creating a "depoliticized" Reyes who was first and foremost a "humanist" (36).

This book proposes a counter-reading, a reclamation of Reyes. While acknowledging that it is true that in his pursuit of his high-toned Aesthetic State Reyes avoided conflict and controversy, Conn shows how Reyes effectively co-opted opposing positions precisely by incorporating them and their sources. This, according to Conn, amounts to a political stance, hence the title of the book. The agendas Reyes "pushed" using this strategy are fairly clear, and not really in question: a liberal state rather than socialist populism or Marxism; Ancient Greece rather than effete France; pan-Latin Americanism grounded in Spain rather thanits rejection of the "mother" country; "life" rather than poor imitation of European art fashions, as was the case of an exhausted modernismo; individualism instead of "groupthink"; a controlled modernity rather than out-of-control formlessness and nihilism; continuity instead of rupture. His conservative value system amounts to, as Conn obliquely phrases it, an "anti-antibourgeois" platform (109).

This book is a study of...