Existentialism Avant la Lettre: The Case of Enrique Labrador Ruiz's El laberinto de sí mismo

Hay pues, en el hombre, en primer término una capacidad dualificante, por la cual la totalidad de su ser se escinde en dos polos o subregiones, a saber: el hombre y el mundo ... el yo y el no-yo.

Humberto Piñera Llera

The critical reception of Latin American Existentialism as mimetic tributary is not too surprising, given the incessant problematic in Latin American culture concerning the anxiety of influence vis-à-vis Europe. The prominent cultural discourses have been marked by a debate between proponents of Americanisms or those who sought "Universal" affinities. Antonio Candido termed this a spiritual problem of Latin American culture manifested through a constant and asymmetrical "dialética do localismo e do cosmopolitismo" (131). Leopoldo Zea's diagnosis is even more straightforward and caustic: "el mal está en que sentimos lo americano, lo propio como algo inferior" (67).¹ Predictably, this identity angst is visible in the Latin American novel and although the pre-Boom era, in particular the pre-1940s, has been much maligned by critics and authors alike, as evidenced by José Donoso's claim of "padres debilitados" (20) in our literary history, a more critical look into the first half of the 20^th century finds an anthropo-philosophical unease percolating beneath the literary surface which goes beyond the Americanist vs. Universalist quandary.² And while for Donald Shaw "los años 30 vieron tan sólo un fenómeno significativo: la llegada de la novela indianista moderna" (19), the aesthetic and ethical contributions of the representatives of our Existentialism avant la lettre of the 1930s cannot be underestimated.

It is important to recall that Hugo Verani has recognized that "without the aesthetic activism of the Vanguardists in the 1920s there would be no modern literature in Latin America" (137). To Verani's position I would further add that the literary Existentialism of the 1930s signifies the ethically charged substratum of the Vanguardists, and therefore is equally seminal for what would become modern literature in Latin America after 1940. Indeed, if we consider that the historians of Existentialist thought have traced its genealogy to the work of Blaise Pascal in the 17^th century, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche in 19^th century and Martin Heidegger in the early 20^th century, then we can understand that the liberating skepticism intrinsic in this line of thought is not restricted to the work of Sartre, Camus, Marcel and de Beauvoir post-WWII. Also, though deep-rooted in the spiritual crisis in Kierkegaard and the virulent cynicism in Nietzsche, the crystallization of an overtly Existentialist ethics does belong to the 20^th century, spurred by the decadent disillusionment at the close of the 19^th century and energized by the regenerative activism of the various Avant-Gardes. The point I want to underline is that the deconstructive zeitgeist of the Vanguard, visible from the first years of the 20^th century until the mid 1930s, was palpable in all of the humanities from the plastic arts, cinema, music, literature and made most evident in the relentless self-questioning of Existentialism.

Part of the critical neglect of Existentialist prose of the 30s can be attributed to the exacerbation with the aesthetic revisionism praised by Verani, because as Gustavo Pérez Firmat explains "by 1934 - after the publication of perhaps three dozen works - the interest in this sort of fiction has all but dissipated" (29).³ In this article I showcase this anticipatory philosophical literature via the Cuban novelist Enrique Labrador Ruiz and his El laberinto de sí mismo (1933), which is simultaneously engaged in the artistic activism of the Avant-Garde but more occupied by the problematic of bad faith, absurdity, freedom and death.⁴ To corroborate Laberinto's place in this Existentialism avant la lettre, I counter position Labrador Ruiz's novel and the more renowned Existentialist work of Jean-Paul Sartre and to a lesser extent Albert Camus, which adds a new critical dimension to the Cuban's work, generally analyzed for its narrative innovations.⁵ To this end, I shall...