Erotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose by Nancy LaGreca (review)

Nancy LaGreca's Erotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose examines what she terms the "double threat" of mysticism and eroticism. In her introduction, she posits that modernista writers "sought to win over the souls of their readers by offering a new religion of ecstatic and aesthetic pleasure" in which "erotic mysticism" functions as "an alternative means of salvation . . . unattached to systematized codes of ethics and behaviors" (16). In the selected texts—all prose works from underrepresented Latin American modernista writers—LaGreca locates a focus on the "I" introspectively, rather than egotistically, and underscores the importance of "intimate and hidden states" in the "non-theistic, sensual, ecstatic dissolution of the self" (21–22). In an effort to demonstrate how and why the two forces of mysticism and eroticism are intimately intertwined in modernista prose, LaGreca dedicates chapter one to a discussion of the two discourses against which they unite, namely positivism and Catholicism. This chapter thus serves to establish background and context for the rest of the study. LaGreca highlights positivism's interest in controlling erotic desire so as to ensure the health of the nation through government-approved reproductive practices and then notes the ways in which modernista discourse sought to expand notions of sexual instinct and erotic pleasure beyond the heteronormative. LaGreca also examines the rhetoric of Catholic propaganda that offered followers the hereafter and promised contact with the divine. She argues that the modernistas demonstrated varied preference for pagan, pre-Christian, Nietzschean, and monistic mysticism as alternatives to Catholicism and located "the key to immortality" in "ecstatic transcendence inspired by art, beauty, the lusty sensuality of nature, and earthly pleasures" (43).

In chapter two, LaGreca examines the prominent theories of non-theistic mysticism in the essayistic prose of Mexico's Carlos Díaz Dufoo and Venezuela's Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, while she dedicates chapter three to the study of the popular yet critically understudied novel Resurección by the well-known Colombian statesman José María Rivas Groot. In Díaz Dufoo's essays and short stories written for the famous modernista journal Revista Azul, LaGreca discovers "seminal theoretical documents of the mystical tendency" that describe "the vague deification of sensual beauty and erotic pleasure, detached from both positivism and Christianity" (40). In her analysis of Díaz Rodríguez, LaGreca traces his mysticism back to its Greek roots and shows how he disassociated mysticism from Christianity and linked it to pagan occult rituals tied to nature as well as to Platonic ideas and a vitalistic Dionysian mysticism as outlined in Nietzsche. According to LaGreca, Díaz Rodríguez "privileges the erotic and celebrates physicality," while his "bodily approach to life and art is in fact spiritual" (75–76). Rivas Groot proposes an alternative form of "resurrection" achieved through "erotic rapture, art, and nature" in which "hopes for salvation" stem from "the beauty of nature and the arts" (97, 41, 91). Writing during the Catholic Regeneration regime in Colombia (1886-99), which made Catholicism the official state religion and promoted ultra-conservative policies, Rivas Groot explores overlapping discourses such as the cult of beauty, the divinization of the arts, and a return to pre-Christian nontheistic mysticism, ideas that closely parallel those explored in chapter two, as well as a new emphasis on non-heteronormative eroticization. LaGreca characterizes Rivas Groot's erotic mysticism as "an inner ecstatic divinity" that elevates and empowers the individual "by tapping into one's inner 'god'—creativity—which leads to meaningful and beautiful works of art" (101). She also highlights the novel's sublimated homoeroticism, in which the male artists find a divine savior not just in Margot, their common muse, but also in the artistic masterpieces they make upon her death (103).

Her analysis of these three authors often describes what might be more appropriately termed "Aesthetic Mysticism" or "Aesthetic Eroticism." Consider, for example, her discussion of Díaz Dufoo's emphasis on the...