El Barroco, marco de agua de la narrativa hispanoamericana by Santiago Cevallos (review)

Cevallos’s book examines a less common variety of Baroque, the Baroque as a hidden or ‘‘latent’’ aesthetic (Barroco latente) in twentieth-century Latin American literature. Cevallos’s distinction between two opposite types of Baroques, ‘‘manifest’’ and ‘‘latent,’’ joins a long-standing thread of debate in Baroque studies that traces Baroque expression outside the inner circle of the stylistics of Baroque extravagance and excess. An older study that comes to mind for making a parallel distinction in European seventeenth-century literature is Frank Warnke’s Versions of Baroque, which differentiates between an ‘‘ornate, exclamatory, emotional’’ trend in works of the High Baroque, typified by Crashaw, Gryphius, Marino, or Góngora, and a ‘‘spare, witty, intellectual’’ trend exemplified by Donne, Marvell, or Quevedo, whose Baroque traits are more conceptual and restrained than expressive (12). Cevallos finds the ‘‘latent’’ Baroque in three early-twentieth-century Latin American writers: the Ecuadorian Pablo Palacio, the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. The study concludes with a fourth chapter on Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s essays and fiction as an example of the ‘‘manifest’’ Baroque, or more precisely, barroco como manifestación. Cevallos frames his investigation of the ‘‘latent Baroque’’ in twentieth-century Latin American literature as an extension of Julio Ortega’s claim that the Baroque has been the latent aesthetic of Hispanic American literature from its inception to the present, as well as Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s affirmation that the Baroque constitutes the latter’s watermark (marco de agua). Unlike the ‘‘manifest’’ Baroque, the ‘‘latent’’ Baroque is visible only indirectly, like a watermark against the light. Indeed, Cevallos intends his paired categories of latent vs. manifest Baroque to replace ‘‘la división simple entre un Barroco y un Neobarroco hispanoamericanos’’ (11) as more precise terms able to capture internal differences within the historical Hispanic American literary Baroque as well as the Neobaroque. He elaborates: ‘‘En este sentido, propongo diferenciar entre distintas formas del mismo: a) un Barroco dominante —que se corresponde con un Barroco histórico hispanoamericano—, b) un Barroco manifiesto, c) un Barroco latente y d) un Barroco como manifestación. La presente investigación atiende a las últimas dos formas del Barroco, vale decir, busca postular la existencia de una Barroco latent [sic] en relación con un Barroco como manifestación’’ (11–12). Cevallos further insists on the subtle distinction between Barroco manifiesto and Barroco como manifestación: the latter is a (favorable) classification of Lezama Lima’s work (‘‘en el sistema lezamiano nos encontramos con un Barroco como manifestación, vale decir, . . . con un Barroco como la expresión americana’’ [253]), whereas the former refers to Carpentier’s work and is intended to be disparaging.

Given the length of this study, the circle of Baroque and Neobaroque criticism Cevallos engages with is relatively small: his main critical interlocutors are Severo Sarduy, Irlemar Chiampi, and Walter Benjamin. The merit of Cevallos’s study is its in-depth engagement with and application of their arguments in extensive close readings of primary works by Palacio, Onetti, Borges, and Lezama Lima. And although he invokes Bolívar Echeverría’s and Chiampi’s studies about the alternative modernity of the Latin American Baroque in the introduction and conclusion, this is not the direction his study takes. Aside from the observation that the Latin American Baroque follows a historical trajectory from a dominant mode in the seventeenth century to a latent mode in the twentieth century, made by way of invoking Echeverría—’’el Barroco en América Latina habría permanecido, en distintos niveles, de una forma dominante, hasta volverse paulatinamente marginal y subterráneo, latente, en vocabulario de la presente investigación’’ (13)—Cevallos sets aside cultural and literary history in favor of formalist analyses of Baroque semiotics and stylistics grounded in Sarduy’s poststructuralist approach to the Baroque and the Neobaroque. The difference between ‘‘bad’’ (Carpentier) and ‘‘good...