Painting Modernism

Introduction

I X INTRODUCTION This book deals with a major aspect of Latin American modernism that canonical criticism has neglected to examine in its various dimensions.1 The chapters of Painting Modernism are constructed upon the fundamental notion that literary texts should no longer be studied in isolation from other artistic discourses and that as a consequence we need to (re)examine the works generated by the writers affiliated with Latin American modernism , whose textual production transcends the limits of language and verbal imagery, or as David Scott has noted in chronicling the early history of “writing the arts”: . . . inter-art correspondences . . . [are] predicated in part on a new concept of the artist, one that implie[s] the widening of the term to include the writer and the musician on the same footing as the painter and sculptor. (66) We also are guided by the notion that “seeing comes before words”2 and that it is “seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.”3 In the chapters that follow we use the term modernism in its broadest multidimensional implications, overriding traditional conceptualizations that both in the past and present view its texts as nothing more than aesthetic and escapist creations belonging to a period between 1888 and 1916.4 As we have indicated elsewhere,5 modernism’s texts are both literary and social, and they are tied to the advent of Latin America’s socioeconomic modernization; its writers, either consciously or unconsciously, responded in similar but fundamentally different ways to the new sociocultural order created by this process in texts that appeared as early as X PA I N T I N G M O D E R N I S M 1875 and as late as the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Modernism revisited today in the light of contemporary revisionist scholarship contains what we have referred to as “secret genealogies”6 tied to a revisioning of its texts, one that is posited on the notion that modernism needs to be understood as an early manifestation of the notion of textual instability, an inconstancy that Baudelaire expressed early on in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (Ward and Patty, 18). Thus envisioned, Latin American modernism—indeed Western modernism—contains cadences and multidimensional fluctuations both in its aesthetic as well as its ideological dimensions; its writers responded to the social and political developments that transformed their function in society and the nature of their art in a variety of different manners but with the common denominator of experimentations that included, among others, internalizations, retextualized appropriations of the past, the incorporation of techniques borrowed from the sister arts of painting and music, and the search for spiritual meaning in an age of increasing materialism and industrialization tied to the incipient stages of capitalist society.7 José Martí (Cuba,1853–1895), one of modernism’s earliest literary theorists—and one of its principal writers—described the lack of constancy of these new-age transformations and the literary productions they produced , which he was instrumental in creating,8 in the following manner: “There are no permanent works because the texts that belong to periods of realignment and restructuring are in essence mutable and turbulent: there are no set paths, new altars, broad and open as forests, are not yet visible . . .” (No hay obra permanente, porque las obras de los tiempos de reenquiciamiento y remolde son por esencia mudables e inquietas; no hay caminos constantes, vislúbranse apenas los altares nuevos . . .) (Martí 1963–1978, 7: 225]).9 As a consequence, it is fallacious to view modernism as a school with prescribed or fixed modes of writing; its textual manifestations are multiple, heterological. Moreover, a rereading of the prose and poetry of this modern period of experimental literature reestablishes foundational links to subsequent postmodernist art. Its texts are a reflection of the openness, instability, ambiguity, and chaos of the metamorphic sociopolitical institutions of the modern world—West and East. Latin American modernism—which spans both the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth—is characterized, as we and other contemporary critics see it, by a pluralistic imaginary, and in that sense it is similar to the notion of the multiple existential philosophies of the twentieth century; and its texts are connected to elitist as well [3.139.82.23] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 22...