Painting Modernism

Chapter Two: Painted Narrations: The Modernist Novel

1 5 2 PAINTED NARRATIONS The Modernist Novel Narrating modernity’s unstable realities assumed a variety of forms in genres that included the novel, the short story, theater, crónica,1 the prose poem, art criticism, and verse. The novel first appeared in Mexico in 1882 with the title Por donde se sube al cielo (The road to heaven), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s recently discovered, unfinished text,2 which, though innovational—to a point—is still heavily influenced by romantic narrative techniques. Yet it set the tone for many of the modernist novels that followed.3 By and large these novels—in spite of their individual originality and their heterogeneity with regard to style—are explorations of the inner self in a challenging, rapidly evolving new world. Aníbal González, in his brief work on the modernist novel,4 notes they deal with the role of the intellectual, the writer, or the artist in new social circumstances, a focus he identifies on the one hand with French origins, especially the Dreyfus affair, and, on the other as a product of the crisis created in Latin America by the Spanish American War (28). While these may be genuine attributions that serve to explain the rise of the modernist novel, in our view the genesis of these novels is more closely tied to the modernist writers’ gaze at and reaction to the structural changes in Latin American society introduced by the advent of a new economic and social order and the resulting anguished sense of social, cultural, and political displacement the writers of the period experienced. In describing the shift in their social status—from the center to the periphery—Angel Rama explains that modernist writers lost the prominent cultural position many held in the old patriarchal order; briefly stated, they were thrown into the “marketplace” of early Latin American capitalism; they were faced with an unfamiliar set of social and cultural institutions. In an attempt to 1 6 PA I N T I N G M O D E R N I S M (re)define and (re)locate themselves, their gaze was no longer solely outward , as was the case of the major realistic and naturalistic novelists, but principally inward; and their inspiration was drawn from subjects both national and international, both contemporary and historical. By and large they tended to internalize the present and reinscribe the past in an effort to bring meaning to their contemporary confused and anomalous social universe. And although it may appear that the landscapes they painted were exotic or escapist, in fact, they were significant social, cultural, and even political introspections, inscapes that reflect an unstable, rapidly evolving social order and the ensuing struggle of writers and intellectuals to understand modernity’s complexities and situate themselves within an uncharted social situation. As early as 1881, Martí explained to his Venezuelan readers the need in Latin America for new forms of literary expression, linked their genesis to the contemporary social malaise, defended their appearance, and justified the use of nontraditional, experimental discourse. All of which, as was his custom, he expressed metaphorically: It is clear [he wrote] that we are passengers of a human ship, like all humanity, tossed around and toppled by huge waves; it is clear we were born in an age that scrutinizes, shouts, dislocates ; neither the clamor, nor the advantages, nor the tasks of the embattled universe are unknown to us; it is also clear that having been born as humans, we suffer unusual distress, just like an eagle forced to live imprisoned in the tiny egg of a dove. (Cierto que, pasajeros de la nave humana, somos a par del resto de los hombres, revueltos y empujados por las grandes olas; cierto que, venido a la vida en época que escruta, vocea y disloca, ni los clamores, ni los provechos, ni las faenas del universo batallador nos son extrañas; cierto también que por nacer humanos, singulares dolores nos aquejan, como de águila forzada a vivir presa en un menguado huevecillo de paloma.) (1963–1973, 7: 210) Further on, in this same essay—“El carácter de la Revista Venezolana”— he went on to say that faced with changing historical conditions, writers (by extension, artists and intellectuals) must speak with a different tongue given the nature of the changed environment in which they find themselves . Language, he indicated, must reflect the unfamiliar conditions of [18.220.154.41] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 23:04 GMT...