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CR: The New Centennial Review 2.2 (2002) 56-57



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Orígenes:
The Last Cuban Avant-garde

Signs: The Other Disintegration
"La otra desintegración." Orígenes 4, no. 21 (spring 1949)

José Lezama Lima
Translated by Stephen D. Gingerich


NEAR THE CRITICAL INDEX FINGER THAT POINTS TO THE LACK OF THE NATION'S imagination—a lack that is not definitive but the absence of a projection or an impulsion through more splendid zones—it is necessary to continually yield up forms that surpass this disintegration. If this pointing is essentially critical, its remedy will have to overflow with creation and images. That is to say, it will have to avoid falling into a crude Manichaeism of signaling what is bad and the occurrence of Malignance. It will also—this is what we assign to ourselves and demand of ourselves—have to situate us within what Plato called erotic knowledge. Valery already underlined that European intelligence has been always very superior to European politics, and that that has been Europe's salvation. The Romantic tradition of intoxication and dreams was intertwined with, was opposed to—and bore witness to—the other, Goethean tradition of clarity and serene happiness. And thus always within the expected causalities in which the state forms became rigidified, European man showed together with the infinite spiral of his knowledge the possibilities of other adventures, where man would be able to rescue his double essential destiny: a knowledge of the other and of the multiple, remaining at the same time incessantly tempting and obscure.

Half a century is an appreciable length of time for any conclusion. What, in the nineteenth century, was for us integration and an ascendant spiral turns into disintegration in the twentieth. Why did it happen in this way? The Bolivian conspiracies, the wars of '68 and '95, Martí, the push for autonomy, these were projections that have not had equals in the following half a century. And in truth they were necessities, since their absence caused collapse and intimidation in the twentieth century. Even the most optimistic jouisser will have to recognize that the forces of disintegration have been far [End Page 56] superior to those that normally, in a state, go along creating their counterpoint and the adaptability of their responses. As a testament to the perforated municipal honor of the first years as a republic—an honor that was contextual and made up, in any case—if in those fortunate years ten families walked away benefiting from public loans and contracts, these days there are a hundred that come out of every government turning against their own banker, which is the public finance. We would have been able to appose this deeply negative, almost unstoppable trend if in other sectors of taste and sensibility, we had possessed a desire to create, to maintain an attitude of searching for what is capital and secret. It is not that we want to parallel a situation and a remedy brought from France of the nineteenth century, of which it was said that for all its being a potent source of intellectual creation, it had created the myth of itself as a potent military force. Instead, we want to indicate that a country frustrated in its political essence can reach virtues and expressions through other, more real resources. And it is deeper than a simple Puritanism, the bat of the senses and the decapitator of its gratification. It is as if it sprang from the very sources of creation, the ethical attitude that is derived from an achieved beauty. If one of our novels were to touch on what is visible and most distant, our counterpoint and the chime of our reality, much of this tediousness and lasciviousness would disappear upon presenting itself as a seen and touched body, like the enemy that is going to be replaced. If a poetry belonging to one of us were to reach such a weave that it would show in its grace a reality still untouched, however desirous of being incarnated, for such a reason it...

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