New Art, New Woman: Old Constructs: Gomez de la Serna, Pedro Salinas, and Vanguard Fiction

As a manifestation of the modernist movement of the first half of the twentieth century a subcategory known as vanguard or avant-garde literature emerged in the Hispanic world and most of western Europe. ¹ Often referred to as the "new art" when it began to assert itself in Spain and Latin America in the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, it also boasted of representing a "new woman," a claim that I propose to examine here. When some critics of the time (male of course) objected that the anti-conventional mode of this arte joven and its attempt to change the historical representation of women were expressions of deficient virility, of effeminacy (see for example Pérez Firmat 37), they drew attention to a gender issue central to vanguard art. These same detractors at times went so far as to charge that the new mode was guilty of emasculating the male image. ² Yet today many would answer the charge of masculine emasculation by counter-charging that the vanguardists in fact were guilty of perpetuating feminine violations. By examining some representative examples from El novelista of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and from Víspera del gozo of Pedro Salinas, ³ I propose to demonstrate how these male-authored vanguard texts project female representations that can be considered both seditiously threatening and stereotypically comforting to a virile discursive tradition.

Conventional gender constructs serve as the comfort zone for the male protagonists and narrators of the works to be discussed. When faced with the threat of a new and disquieting female image, they turn to historical and canonized models for reassurance. Each male character seems to find in these stable and familiar constructs the support to counteract the vicissitudes of his own existence; he apparently needs the reassurance of woman's materiality to counteract his anxiety over his own ethereality. In addition, for each of these protagonists woman seems to represent what Peter Brooks defines as "an inextricable link between erotic desire and the desire to know" (22). Yet in the Spanish examples the search for knowledge may be labeled more accurately a quest for reassurance; the textual strategies involve either killing off the unfamiliar female or, even more significantly, relying on comparisons to familiar older models as a means to explain, and thereby negate the threat of, a new breed.

The first work I propose to analyze, Gómez de la Sernas's El novelista, fits the conventional definition of novel in title only. It consists of a series of disconnected and often absurd vignettes of widely varying length and content, each of which features a distinct internal focalizer. These narrative fragments represent a series of novels written by Andrés Castilla, who serves as both dramatized author and unifying thread for the disjointed collage. ⁴ Andrés in turn is subject to the narrative presentation of an analytic non-character narrator. ⁵ Yet final textual authority resides in the posited author or the implicit creator of the strategies outlined. ⁶ In the following analysis I propose to demonstrate how the posited author manipulates this contrived fictional edifice to underscore, consciously or otherwise, an equivocal attitude toward gender issues, an attitude that in effect echoes certain discursive practices of the 1920s. ⁷

The chapters dedicated to "Pueblo de adobes" (20-26) offer a good example of how the text creator blends gender and genre issues in El novelista. The dramatized narrator is Andrés Castilla and the novel he is writing, the intertext, appears in italics. In short, process (the narration about Andrés) and product (his supposed novel) are seemingly juxtaposed, although the true process, that concerning the posited author who is creating Andrés and the non-character or anonymous narrator, remains hidden.

A significant portion of Andrés's "novel" involves three characters: Clemente, an orphaned bachelor, Do&ntilde...