The Novels of Origenes

Si una novela nuestra tocase en lo visible y más lejano, nuestro contrapunto y toque de realidades, muchas de esas pesadeces o lascivias, se desvanecerían al presentarse como cuerpo visto y tocado, como enemigo que va a ser reemplazado.

[If one novel of ours were to touch on what is visible and what is most distant, our counterpoint and vertex of realities, many of these burdens and lecheries would vanish after being shown as an observable and tangible body, as an enmity about to be replaced.]

—José Lezama Lima, " La otra desintegración" (The other disintegration)¹

I

One intriguing aspect of the Orígénes phenomenon in Cuba is the emergence in the late seventies of a peculiar subgenre in that nation's post-1959 narrative: the Orígenes novel. With the Orígenes phenomenon I mean the process of rectification that has occurred within the cultural officialdom of the Cuban Revolution whereby a pre-Revolutionary aesthetic ideology belligerently stigmatized in the sixties as "vacuous," "hermetic," "formalistic," "anesthetized," "evasionist," and "ineffectual"—as was Orígenes—becomes rehabilitated in the eighties and nineties as a symbol of a socially progressive Cuba and of a nationalist teleology of emancipation. ² The nominally "apolitical" high modernist literary and cultural journal Orígenes that José Lezama Lima and José Rodríguez Feo edited from 1944 to 1956, as well as most of the Cuban poets in the so-called Grupo Orígenes associated with this editorial enterprise, have now gained great iconic power and institutional prestige in today's Cuba. This rectification thus corrects and atones for an early phase of silencing and denunciation of the Orígenes enterprise orchestrated by succeeding journals and cadres such as Ciclón (1956-59), Lunes de Revolución (1959-61), and Casa de las Américas during its first decade (1960-70). ³ A secluded, independent literary project, Orígenes arose and flourished during the corruption-ridden years of Ramón Grau San Martín's Auténtico Party constitutional regime (1944-52) and drew to a close during General Fulgencio Batista's second dictatorship (1952-58). Orígenes was first neglected, derided, or resented by its contemporaries; antagonized by the radical intellectuals and apparatchiks of the first years of Castro's Revolution; officially ignored in the seventies; and finally fully canonized in 1994 in one of the most important international conferences held that decade in Cuba. ⁴

Writing about the usefulness of genre theory in critical analysis, Claudio Guillén argues that it is enough to find "significant resemblances" among a given group of historically contiguous texts to begin to propose or "decide upon" the idea of a new genre. Regarding genre as a dynamic, diachronic interplay between universal formal conventions and historical particulars, as a "problem solving model on the level of form" for both the poet and the practical critic, Guillén ascribes to the concept a generative, poietic power that emphasizes "process and instrumentality" in artistic creation. ⁵ Thus Guillén sees genre (and subgenre) as part of a dialectic of expressive and critical renovation in which new forms are historically engineered or recognized. Still, at first sight, Guillén's ideas or genre conceptions in general may not seem appropriate for a discussion of what I am choosing to call here the "Orígenes novel." First of all, this subgenre is made up—so far—of only two texts, both published in 1978: Cintio Vitier's De Peña Pobre first came out in Mexico; Lorenzo García Vega's Los años de Orígenes in Caracas. ⁶ Second, these texts are interpretative accounts of the Orígenes saga written by members of the original circle who have been bitterly opposed personally and ideologically since Vitier's 1968 public espousal of the Revolution in a conference at the José Martí National Library and García Vega's departure from Cuba...