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[ 15 ] Chapter 1 The Myths of European Modernity There is a radical difference between Europeans and Spanish Americans: when Baudelaire indicts progress as “a grotesque idea,” or when Rimbaud denounces industry, their experiences of progress and industry are real, direct, whereas those of Spanish Americans are derivative. —Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire It is also necessary to bear in mind . . . that by 1913 France . . . was not an industrial or truly industrialized country. . . . France remained fundamentally a peasant-based rural economy. —François Crouzet,“The Historiography of French Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century” What is more significant in all these cases is that the modernity of the states in question is a modernity for other peoples, an optical illusion nourished by envy and hope, by inferiority feelings and the need for emulation. —Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity The late nineteenth century in Spanish America was saturated with writers who were coming to grips with the changes in the texture of life brought about by modernization, depicting an environment of transformations and uncertainty full of possibilities and paths of exploration. In 1882, Cuban José Martí addressed the profound effects of the times on art, the artist, and society at large in his famous prologue to Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde’s “Poema del Niágara,” while Mexican Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera had an ironic flâneur hop onto a trolley and gaze at a growing Mexico City in his “La novela del tranvía” (The Novel of the Trolley). In 1888, Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío first coined the literary term“modernismo ,” and Spanish critic Juan Valera saw all the main issues of “modern life” addressed in Darío’s collection Azul . . . (Blue . . . ; hereafter referred to as Azul). In 1895, Amado Nervo’s novel El bachiller caused quite a stir in Mexico and a year [ 16 ]   The Inverted Conquest later, Colombian José Asunción Silva and Uruguayan Carlos Reyles wrote novels that explicitly addressed a new kind of reading public. That same year, José Enrique Rodó, also Uruguayan, published an essay about this new literature in which he strived to convey what almost a century later Marshall Berman would label “the experience of modernity”:“el espectáculo de una cultura en cuyo seno hierven a un tiempo todas las ideas y todas las pasiones, en cuyo ambiente se entrechocan todas las resonancias del Deseo, del Entusiasmo y del Dolor, concurso extraño de aspiraciones sin armonía, de dudas sin respuesta, de contradicciones sin solución, de voces de esperanza y de angustia” (164) [the spectacle of a culture at the center of which all ideas and all passions are boiling at once, in whose milieu all the echoes of Desire, Enthusiasm, and Pain are crashing together, a strange confluence of aspirations without harmony, of doubts without answer, of contradictions without solution, of voices of hope and of anguish].1 It is striking then that despite the clear modernista connection with the modern , the critical discourse on modernismo has generally been skeptical—when not dismissive—of that connection, considering it derivative, imperfect, or phantasmagoric . Despite recognizing modernismo’s many literary achievements, scholarship has had a propensity to highlight the movement’s “debts” to European literature. Even when traditional formalist criticism, largely focused on identifying elements of European artistic trends in modernista texts, gave way to contemporary approaches that have placed the movement in its sociohistorical context, the question of European influence has continued to hold center stage in Spanish American modernista studies. To be sure, by reading modernismo in relation to economic, political, and social forces in the context of the global economy at the turn of the century, contemporary approaches have advanced tremendously our understanding of modernismo and provided a more nuanced vision of its complexities and its relationship to both American and European cultures.2 Yet, when exploring the relationship between modernismo and nineteenth-century modernity, critics have tended to doubt the concepts and experiences articulated so forcefully by the writers themselves. For some decades, critics have asked variations of the same question : Was there really an experience of modernity to speak of in Spanish America? Were Martí, Darío, Rodó, and their many peers actually experiencing modernity themselves or were they simply living it vicariously,“derivative[ly],” as Octavio Paz put it early on (Hijos 132; Children 91), acting as if they were modern, in Aníbal González’s view? Was Spanish America“forced,” as Marshall Berman quickly and anachronistically assumes, “to build on...

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