Buckwalter-Arias Re Inscribing the Aesthetic

8/2/2019 Buckwalter-Arias Re Inscribing the Aesthetic

1/13

Reinscribing the Aesthetic: Cuban Narrativeand Post-Soviet Cultural Politics

-

JAMES BUCKWALTER-ARIAS is an assistant

professor of Spanish at Hanover College.

His articles on contemporary Cuban lit-

erature will appear this year in Cuban

Studies and Encuentro de la cultura cu-

bana. This essay is adapted from a book

project on Cuban literary narrative writ-

ten after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

La literatura cubana est de fiesta yEncuentro quiere subrayarlo y celebrarlo.

Cuban literature is on a roll, andEncuentro wishes to draw attention to it

and celebrate it.

Jess DazIN HIS INTRODUCTORY REMARKS TO THE 1998 SUMMER ISSUE OF THE Madrid-based journal Encuentro de la cultura cubana, Jess Dazannounced that Cuban literature est de fiesta is on a roll (Defiesta 3). Guillermo Cabrera Infante had won the 1998 Premio Cer-

vantes; Ral Rivero had won the Journalists without Borders award;Eliseo Alberto had won the Alfaguara award for his novel CaracolBeach; Dana Chaviano had won the Azorn award for her novelEl hombre, la hembra y el hambre ; and two new publishing housesin Spain, Colibr and Casiopea, had announced their plans to fore-ground the literature of Cuba in their catalogs. Significantly, of themotivos de alegra reasons to celebrate that Daz cited, all six orig-inated outside Cuba (3). Of the four Cuban writers mentioned, onlyoneRiverowas living in Cuba at the time this issue ofEncuentro

was published. And the Journalists without Borders prize, of which hewas the recipient, is itself awarded from overseas, in this case for jour-nalism written for non-Cuban publications. If Cuban literature estde fiesta, thefiesta is not, by this account, taking place in Cuba.

Dazs claim is tendentious and controvertible, but it does con-

stitute an event in itself, insofar as it dramatizes the changing con-

ditions under which such a statement can be made, plausibly, to a

large readership. A change has taken place, if not, as Daz goes on

to suggest, in terms of the quality and prolificacy of Cuban litera-

[ P M L A

[ 2005 by the modern language association of america

]


2/13

ture, then certainly in terms of the way it isreceived byand marketed foran inter-national, Spanish-speaking readership. Forthe first time since the triumph of the Cuban

Revolution in 1959, a recently exiled Cubanwriter can imply that the institutional locusof Cuban culture is no longer Cuba but ratherla metrpoli the metropolitan center, fromwhich Cuba gained its independence preciselyone hundred years earlier. e ideal locusorperhaps the only possible locusfor an en-cuentro gathering among members of whatDaz describes as a cultura fracturada frac-tured culture (3), that vantage from which

Cuban culture can project itself into the in-ternational imaginary, is, in other words, theinternational market that the Cuban Revolu-tion has had so much stake in resisting and towhich it has provided such institutional alter-natives as Casa de las Amricas, the ICAIC,and the UNEAC. For many on the politicalle around the world, these institutions haverepresented alternatives to the wholesale com-modification of cultural artifacts; these werenew kinds of institutions for which the cul-

ture industry of the West, some argued, hadno category, no conceptual framework. ButEncuentro is grounded in the premise thatthe cultural institutions of the Cuban Revo-lution can no longer offer such a space, if in-deed they ever did; the rigid cultural politicsand material bankruptcy of these institutionshave rendered them all but irrelevant. Dazscelebratory rhetoric, then, would herald thedeath of that collective project to which he

and many of the collaborators on the maga-zine devoted the better part of their lives.

In no small measure it is the collapseof the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe thatmakes it possible for Daz to employ suchrhetoric in the 1990s, that makes it possible tocast Encuentro as the post-socialist brokerof Cuban culture and distinguish itself ideo-logically from the earlier cultural projects ofCuban exiles, which may have been more eas-

ily dismissed by the le as reactionary. e

events of the late 1980s and early 1990sthefall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of theSoviet Union, the loss of Soviet subsidies inCuba and the resulting economic crisis on the

island, the disappearance of the Eastern Eu-ropean market for Cuban literature, the en-during paper crisis, and the impoverishmentof the islands cultural institutionsset newparameters for discourse on Cuban culturearound the globe. e historical juncture thathas come to be known as Cubas special pe-riod in times of peace becomes the occasion,therefore, for reexamining the cultural para-digms that aer the first thirty years of social-

ist government find themselves so embattled.e conditions that make it possible forDaz to declare, in Spain, that Cuban lit-erature est de fiesta will not be easily ap-preciated by many on the island, for simplematerial reasons: the books written by EliseoAlberto, Dana Chaviano, and Guillermo Ca-brera Infante and those published by Colibrand Casiopea are not sold in Cuba. e jour-nalism of Rivero is not only unpublished inCuba but banned. Meanwhile, fewer books

are published on the island than before 1990,the number of copies printed is compara-tively small, and second editions generally donot follow because of the lack of money andmaterials, regardless of how quickly a booksells out. When Cuban writers are publishedabroad and their books are sold on the is-landin Havana bookstores catering to tour-ists, for examplethe cost is prohibitive. Abook published in Spain might sell for fieen

or twenty United States dollars, roughly theequivalent of what a Cuban university pro-fessor earns in a month. The revalorizationof popular commercial culture under way insome academic circles in the West, therefore,may seem alien in a Cuba that is witnessing arecommercialization of its culture but whosecitizenry has little access to the new commod-ities. Moreover, to the extent that the con-sumer able to pay for books and compact discs

by Cuban artists lives overseas, the products

2 0 . 2 ] James Buckwalter-Arias


3/13

that get funded and distributed in la metrpoliwill attend, one assumes, to the ideologicaland cultural demands of that market.

It is not surprising, then, that the texts

I discuss here, written by resident Cubansand recent exiles, express a profound disen-chantment with contemporary Cuba, a bitterdisillusionment with the socialist project towhich the nation has devoted the last fourdecades. ere is an intense nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Cuban culture, a reassertionof a brand of aesthetic discourse the socialistgovernment emphatically rejected, a will tofree art from political exigencies, and a rein-

scription of a romantic idea of artistic geniusthat the revolution disavowed. e Orgenesliterary group in particularwhich includedsuch writers as Jos Lezama Lima, Cintio Vi-tier, and Eliseo Diegois exalted in much re-cent literary and critical writing. e figuresrepudiated by government officials in the1970s and early 1980s for their elitist aestheticideology and their apparent indifference tourgent political struggles emerge in recentwriting as champions of artistic freedom, as

writers too committed to art as such to al-low themselves to become instruments of apolitical project. eir aesthetic discourseapolitically unaligned discourse, some wouldclaimemerges as the highest expression oftrue, individual liberty, while the emancipa-tory discourse of revolution, which has envi-sioned liberty in explicitly collective terms,is increasingly associated with totalitarianpolitics and mediocre art. e great Cuban

writers adopted by the revolution, AlejoCarpentier and Nicols Guilln, now pay fortheir former privilege con el desinters demuchsimos lectores with the diminishedinterest of so many readers (Ponte 8). Andmany Cuban writers who became knownduring the revolutionfor their socialist re-alism, for exampleare seldom discussed atall anymore. is essay is a response to thesetrends, a meditation on the relation between,

on the one hand, the flourishing of a pre- or

extrarevolutionary aesthetic discourse in re-cent literary narrative and, on the other, thedebilitation of the socialist metanarrative andthe concomitant reinsertion of Cuban culture

into the international market.The relation between historical devel-

opment and narrative rendering is a greatdeal more nuanced and provocative than theprevailing disillusionment might suggest.Beyond the disenchantment and its atten-dant nostalgias, the texts discussed here arebound together by a deep preoccupation withthe changing role of art in Cuba, with artsincreasingly complex role both in the cultural

politics of Cubas socialist government and inthe economic relations of the internationalmarket. While most of the texts I discuss arenot set in the special period, they speaknevertheless to the interval in which theyare written and published, a period in whichthe socialist cultural paradigm is severelyshaken but in which the reclaimed aestheticdiscourse is arguably out of step, in a numberof ways, with Cubas present-day economic,political, and cultural realities.

Return of a Repressed Aesthetic

Much recent Cuban literature reasserts abrand of aesthetic discourse the regime re-pressed for the first thirty years or so of power.e partial reabsorption of Cuban literatureby a transatlantic publishing market and theregimes diminishing control over culturalproduction make it possible for Cuban writers

to turn the tables on the official revolutionarynarrative by casting the individualistic, argu-ably romantic artist as hero and the govern-ment official, formerly vaunted as the peoplesrepresentative, as antagonist. In the process,however, the revived extrarevolutionary aes-thetic is thrust into a narrative environmentso profoundly dialogic, politically charged,and historically specific that the generallyahistorical, universalizing discourse bumps

up against its own limitations, as it were. e

Reinscribing the Aesthetic: Cuban Narrative and Post-Soviet Cultural Politics [ P M L A


4/13

artist-protagonistsnovelists, poets, play-wrights, theater directorsborrow heavilyfrom a modernist aesthetic discourse that ex-plicitly rejects commodification, but they do

so precisely as Cuban culture, including lit-erature, is recommodified. e reinscriptionof this extrarevolutionary aesthetic discourse,then, in texts that are set in revolutionaryCuba and circulate for the most part in over-seas markets is framed, ideologically, by atension between the embattled socialist super-structure and the reintroduced capitalist base.Cubas suspension, as it were, between a stateand a marketplacea Cuba in which neither

the socialist state nor global capitalism can besaid to be the cultural dominantis playedout in the personal and interpersonal dramasof various characters, who run the gamutfrom fictional to biographical.

I focus here on the confrontation betweenthe artist and the government official in partbecause, in reinscribing this drama, recenttexts make a case, implicitly or explicitly, foran alternative cultural politics. ey do so byexposing, in a manner peculiar to narrative,

the contradictions that underlie the culturalpolitics of Cubas socialist state, a liberal no-tion of individual freedom associated withthe market, and an art-for-arts-sake ethosthat claims for the creative mind an indepen-dence from the institutional constraints ofboth state and market. Narrative becomes aspace in which the social contradictions andphilosophical blind spots that undermineprogressive cultural politics can be exposed

and developed in a special way. In the dialogicimagination of the novel, aer all, contradic-tion may represent dramatic resource ratherthan cognitive lapse. In the novel and shortstory, a socialist realist aesthetic and a high-modernist aesthetic can encounter each otheralmost in the manner of antagonists. Thenovel and short story thrive, at the same time,on the tension between a narrative that aimsto represent lived psychic and social experi-

encein the figure of the narratively situated

personageand the philosophical discoursesthat aim, in contrast, at a disembodied reasonand propositional coherence.

Jess Dazs Las palabras perdidas, Eliseo

Albertos Informe contra m mismo, and Leo-nardo PadurasMscaras are three examplesof narrative texts that in challenging the rev-olutions thoroughly instrumentalist culturalpolicies also problematize the notion of theautonomous objet dart projected almost re-flexively, in much cultural discourse, onto theconcept of the commodity. But the most ex-plicit, strident critique, in all three novels, isleveled at the regime. is critique, framed by

the encounter between artist and the govern-ment official, can be thought of as a restagingof the most memorableand for many deeplytraumaticdialogues between intellectualsand government officials that took place in the1960s and 1970s. In June 1961, for example,the nations artists and intellectuals gatheredin the National Library in Havana to discuss,as Castro stated in the events closing remarks,si debe haber o no una absoluta libertad decontenido en la expresin artstica whetheror not there should be absolute freedom ofcontent in artistic expression (Palabras 7). Hisconclusion established the parameters for dis-course in the revolution from that moment on.Since the revolution is of and for el pueblothe people, Castro argued, no one belongingto the formerly privileged class of artists andintellectuals has a right to speak against it:

[D]entro de la Revolucin, todo; contra la

Revolucin nada. Contra la Revolucin nada,porque la Revolucin tiene tambin sus dere-chos y el primer derecho de la Revolucin es

el derecho a existir y frente al derecho de la

Revolucin de ser y existir, nadie. (11)

[W]ithin the Revolution, everything; againstthe Revolution nothing. Against the Revolu-tion nothing, because the Revolution also hasits rights and the first right of the Revolution isthe right to exist and in opposition to the right

of the Revolution to exist, there can be no one.



5/13

e revolution and the speakerCastroareimplicitly and unassailably one. e artists andintellectuals, according to a logic that may seemoddly familiar, are either with us or against us.

Ten years later, in 1971, during what cameto be known as the caso Padilla Padilla af-fair, Castro addressed the First NationalCongress on Culture and Education. Al-though the audience was Cuban, he clearlyhad in mind those foreign intellectuals whojust three weeks earlier had written the Cu-ban leader para . . . pedirle reexamine lasituacin que este arresto [del poeta y escri-tor Heberto Padilla] ha creado asking him

to reexamine the situation that this arrest[of the poet and writer Heberto Padilla] hascreated. Padilla, according to the signers ofthe letter, had simply ejercido el derecho decrtica dentro de la Revolucin exercised theright to criticize from within the Revolution(Padilla 123; emphasis mine). In his closingremarks, Castro characterizes certain foreignintellectuals critical of the revolution as se-ores liberales burgueses and agentillosdel colonialismo cultural liberal bourgeoisseores and petty agents of cultural colonial-ism, a reference to the letters many signers,who included Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Cal-vino, Julio Cortzar, Marguerite Duras, Car-los Fuentes, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, JuanGoytisolo, Octavio Paz, Jean-Paul Sartre, andMario Vargas Llosa.

Castro states unambiguously that therevolutions artistic criteria are political, or

instrumental:

Para nosotros, un pueblo revolucionario enun proceso revolucionario, valoramos las cre-aciones culturales y artsticas en funcin de lautilidad para el pueblo, en funcin de lo queaporten al hombre, en funcin de lo que apor-ten a la reivindicacin del hombre, a la libera-cin del hombre, a la felicidad del hombre.Nuestra valoracin es poltica.(Discurso 28)

For us, a revolutionary people involved in a

revolutionary process, we value cultural and

artistic creations in terms of their utility to

the people, in terms of what they contribute

to mankind, in terms of what they contributeto mans revindication, to mans liberation, to

mans happiness. Our criteria are political.

He thus defines a revolutionary aesthetic interms opposed to those in which the aestheticcategory was originally formulated. In the lateeighteenth century, the aesthetic was conceptu-alizednegatively, as Geoffrey Harpham pointsoutas not desire, not utility, not politics(135). In the revolution, in contrast, the work ofart subserves ethico-political imperatives.

When Castro employs the term aesthetic,

however, a somewhat different argumentemerges:

No puede haber valor esttico sin contenido

humano. No puede haber valor esttico con-

tra el hombre. No puede haber valor esttico

contra la justicia, contra el bienestar, contra

la liberacin, contra la felicidad del hombre.

No puede haberlo! (28)

ere can be no aesthetic value without hu-

man content. ere can be no aesthetic valueagainst mankind. ere can be no aesthetic

value against justice, against wel l-being,

against liberation, against the happiness of

mankind! ere cannot be such a thing!

Castro seems to suggest here that aestheticvalue cannot simply subserve a rational, pro-gressive political agenda, since true aestheticjudgment is of a piece with ethical judgment.He does not develop this idea further, but he

begins to make the familiar case for the inex-tricability of ethical and aesthetic judgment.

This state-decreed aesthetic theory wasstandardized in the revolutions problematicart-as-weapon trope, and the paradigm re-mained unchallenged, and therefore underde-

veloped, for the next twenty or thirty years.Post-Soviet Cuban writers begin to talk backto Fidel, albeit indirectly, chronicling the re-pressive effects of the governments institu-

tionalization of a presumably self-evident



6/13

human content as artistic imperative: CheGuevaras hombre nuevo, for examplethenew man the revolution would produce ina glorious socialist futureis experienced as

an exclusionary model, as a political mecha-nism for repressing deviance; the years 1970to 1975, in which socialist realism dominatesCuban literature, are referred to as el quin-quenio gris the five gray years; the homo-sexual writers Jos Lezama Lima and VirgilioPiera become emblems of misunderstood,unappreciated genius, of neglect or mistreat-ment by the revolutions cultural institutions;the UMAP camps of the 1960smilitary-run

work centers where homosexuals, artists, andother dissidents were internedloom overthe texts; the cultural history of prerevolu-tionary Cubathe popular music of CeliaCruz, for examplehas to be vindicated andreinscribed into the collective memory; con-troversial books are disguised with the jacketsof officially sanctioned books and circulatedamong trustworthy friends; Cubans denouncethe ideological diversionism of friends andfamily members to government officials, sign-

ing the denunciations with false names; the jobof implementing the revolutions cultural poli-cies falls to rigid, small-minded bureaucrats.

Of Poets and Bureaucrats

Jess Dazs novel Las palabras perdidas eLost Words, published in Spain in 1992, con-cerns the Cuban governments repression of agroup of young writers who try to publish a

literary magazine in Havana in the 1960s. Ac-cording to the narrative, the novel itself is thefruit of that effort: including poems, stories,and essays written by its characters, it is in asense the literary magazine the young writershad tried to publish in Cuba. e critique ofthe Castro governments cultural policies is ob-

vious here, and the published novel representsa triumph over those policies. e text is bothchronicle of repression and tangible evidence

of the victory of the artist over the bureaucrat.

While it details the governments repressionof the literary magazine, the magazines even-tual completion in novel form, as renderedby the character el Flaco, is le to the readers

imagination. It could be argued, then, that theimplied arena of triumph for el Flaco and hisnovel (textually identical to Dazs), that spaceof freedom in which the writer is finally ableto redeem his artistic vision and those of hisfriends, is the free market where Daz pub-lishes Las palabras perdidas and subsequentnovels as well. In such a reading, the novelmight be said to imply a congruence among anethos of artistic freedom, a notion of aesthetic

autonomy, and a free-market rationale accord-ing to which the Daz novels circulate.e ideal of an art independent of mun-

dane social practices and institutions, however,is considerably more problematic in this novelthan the triumphalist narrative would suggest.On one occasion, the character el Gordo in-terviews Lezama Lima in the poets home onTrocadero Street, in Havana, and as Lezamaspeaks, el Gordo muses to himself that thepoet perteneca a una especie en extincin, la

de los aristcratas del espritu, para quienes elestablo de los best-sellers deba apestar a estir-col belonged to a species on the verge of ex-tinction, the aristocrats of the spirit, for whomthe stalls of best sellers must reek of manure(135). But the prerevolutionary aristocraticaesthetic sensibility that the characters reassertis inscribed in a novel that is postrevolution-ary in its historical perspective and narrativeconventions. It is also a novel whose commod-

ity status is undeniable, despite its characterscontempt for consumer culture.

e novel contains a materialist subnarra-tive, moreover, in which the relations of poweramong the young writers effectively decon-struct the space of freedom in which an artistcreates without interference, without pressure,without influence. Long before the stories,poems, and articles are denounced by a gov-ernment bureaucrat, they are subjected to an

intense peer critiqueeven ridicule at times



7/13

and to a laborious and self-conscious rewrit-ing, which is clearly carried out with peersin mind. e space ms all de toda contin-gencia beyond all contingency in which the

writers literary hero Lezama Lima situateshimself by la ciclnica fuerza genitora desu obra the cyclonic generative force of hisliterary corpus is idealized in the novel butnever represented; we never see the charactersin such a space (135). e notion of a creativeprocess indifferent to cultural institutions andunswayed by interpersonal power relations isrendered romantic, then, even though thisnotion is an article of faith for the characters.

The arguably modernist aesthetic ideologythey reinscribe is out of step with both thenovels historical setting (1960s Cuba) and theauthors historical present (1990s Spain).

Eliseo Albertos memoir, Informe contram mismo Report against Myself (1997), takesa different tack, reasserting an extrarevolution-ary aesthetic discourse by turning a state sur-

veillance apparatus into a full-fledged literarygenre. e title refers to the reports or informesthat thousands of Cubans have written about

neighbors, friends, co-workers, and relativessince the triumph of the revolution in 1959.ese reports form part of official records onthe political inclinations and activities of thecitizenry. In 1978 Cuban officials ask Albertoto write an informe about his father, the famouspoet Eliseo Diego, who has been receiving vis-its from foreign intellectuals. Alberto complieswith the request, signing his informe Pablo.Informe contra m mismo, then, published in

Spain almost twenty years aer the originalinforme was commissioned, constitutes anironic coming out and coming-of-ageas wellas an ingenious commodificationof a genreshaped by thousands of Cuban writers over theprevious four decades.

Early in the book, Alberto muses thatperhaps it is the literary quality of his writingthat eventually makes Cuban officials lose in-terest in the case: Deben haberse cansado de

mi prosa potica, de mi lirismo, de mis ficcio-

nes intiles ey must have got tired of mypoetic prose, my lyricism, my useless fictions(22). ere is a sense here, as elsewhere in thebook, that a works artistic value and political

utility are inversely related. It is not simplythat the state should not intervene in the liter-ary arts but that a literary sensibility somehowdenatures political writing. e combinationof insightful political analysis and ambitiousformal experimentation in Informe contra mmismo, however, destabilize that assumption.Political and literary discursive conventionsare so thoroughly interwoven that the readeris compelled to ask how, ultimately, the two

categories can be distinguished and to whatextent both are drawn together by theirshared performative qualities.

e notion that art and politics representvarieties of performance rather than a starkantithesis is particularly evident in LeonardoPaduras detective novel Mscaras (Masks[1997]). In 1970s and 1980s Cuba, detectivefiction emerged as the most widely read andmost effective literary medium for social-ist political education. e genre lends itself

well to an explicit didactic agenda within therevolutionary (but by this time thoroughlyinstitutionalized) politics of good versus evil,revolutionary versus counterrevolutionary. Bythe 1990s, however, socialist detective heroesare neither fresh nor convincing. Indeed, Pa-dura argues inModernidad, posmodernidad

y novela policial that publishers and prize-awarding institutions applied low aestheticstandards all along to ensure that detective

fiction imparted instructive and appropriatepolitical messages. Instead of withdrawingfrom history and politics into a realm of pureart inMscaras, however, Padura appropriatesboth the icons of Cuban high modernism andthe propagandistic conventions of revolution-ary detective fiction. His protagonist, the po-lice detective Mario Conde, is an agent of thestate, of course, but also an aspiring writer,and we learn in the final novel of the series,

Paisaje de otoo, that he writes all four novels



8/13

himself aer retiring from the police force. Ithappens that his literary vocation has been atodds with the political system since his stu-dent days, when he wrote a short story for a

school literary magazine, which the admin-istrators later refused to publish. As in Dazsnovel, the socialist bureaucracy suppresses theyoung writers literary magazine and threat-ens its would-be founders with punishment.Again, the published text we read is a vindica-tion of youthful literary aspirations; the art-ist is eventually able to realize his vision andpresent it to us in tangible, textual form.

But pure art does not simply win out over

mere politics; an allegory of performance sub-sumes both. e victim of the novel is in dragwhen he is murdered, dressed as Virgilio Pi-eras character Electra Garrig, from the playof the same name. His murderer, we learn, is ahighly placed government official. e theater,in other words, allegorized in the figure ofPieras Electra, is brutalized by the regime.The same theater, whose playwrights weremarginalized in Cuba and whose emblem,Electra, is murdered in Paduras novel, finally

triumphs on yet another allegorical level, asthe figure of performance subsumes and co-implicates the terms art and politics.

e allegorical dimensions of the novelare significant because Cubas revolutionarydetective fiction generally has been character-ized by criticsincluding Padura himselfasexcessively allegorical and didactic and insuf-ficiently artistic and realist. Although Padu-ras novel certainly critiques the revolutionary

paradigm of detective fiction, it is no less al-legorical than its precursor. It begins with anepigraph from Pieras playElectra Garrigin which the Pedagogue describes Havana asuna ciudad en la que todo el mundo quiereser engaado a city in which everyone wishesto be deceived, thus reinforcing the metaphorof masks, which serves as the novels title,and introducing the theater allegory. Perfor-mance becomes the organizing figure that en-

ables Paduras critique of the regime and of

its revolutionary detective novel: the victimdresses up as Electra Garrig and stages hisown murder; the murderers political career,we learn, is one long performance, his iden-

tity an elaborate mask; and the protagonistsjob, as both detective and writer, is to tell themost convincing story possibleto performwith language alone, in other words, whatothers have staged. If Paduras novels succeedartistically where the revolutionary detectivenovel faileda judgment I neither venturenor contest hereit is not because they areless political, less didactic, or less allegori-cal. e reader is compelled to ask, therefore,

whether the familiar art-propaganda dichot-omy might be less useful here than the modelof art as political performance or of politicsas theatrical performance.

We have looked briefly at three novelshere, but similar arguments can be made abouta number of recent narrative texts by Cubanauthorsfor example, Senel Pazs novella Ellobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo (Mexico,1990), Antonio Jos Pontes El libro perdidode los origenistas (Mexico, 2002), and the

other three novels in Paduras Mario Condeseries (published in both Cuba and Spain).In all these texts, the artists freedom from ordefiance of state manipulation is prized, andthe relation between artistic performance andpolitical ideology is foregrounded and rein-scribed. e incompatibility of authentic artand political persuasion, an article of faith fora number of protagonists and even for somecontemporary literary critics, is contravened

by the narrative structure and the rhetoricalstrategies of the text. e autonomous spaceof artistic creation is alluded to but not rep-resented; what we see instead is a thoroughlypoliticized literary environment in which ar-tistic freedom is encroached on not only bythe state but also by peers, in which the no-tion of freedom is both constituted in anddelimited by ingrained cultural expectations.Literary writing is influenced by rivalry and

ridicule, social performance and interpersonal



9/13

alliance, and saturated with political rhetoricand political history.

Significantly, recent writing does not re-produce or approximate the aesthetic sensibil-

ity of the literary giants to whom the texts payhomage. Lezama, for example, is the literaryhero of Pazs story; Lezama Lima, Alejo Car-pentier, Eliseo Diego, and Nicols Guilln pre-side over Dazs novel; Lezama and Carpentierare, for Alberto, los dos prodigiosos hemis-ferios del cerebro the two prodigious hemi-spheres of the brain (158); Virgilio Piera isthe central literary icon in Paduras mystery.But the texts in which these literary figures

appear are very much of their time, struc-tured very dif ferently, at the syntactic andnarrative levels, from Lezamas neobaroque,Carpentiers real maravilloso marvelousrealism (8) or Pieras Cuentos fros. e con-temporary texts are in fact so removed sty-listically from the revered Cuban precursorsthat in those passages in which the languageof Lezama and Carpentier is approximated oractually quoted, the effect of distance fromthose worksthe historical, cultural, and ide-

ological distanceis dramatic. e modernistgiants of twentieth-century Cuban letters arethus recuperated and le behind in the samegesture, simultaneously venerated and sur-passed in an arguably postmodern pastiche.

e economic and cultural transformationof Cuba aer the collapse of the Soviet Unionhas undoubtedly helped secure the prestige offigures like Lezama and Piera. Writers likePadura, Daz, Ponte, and Alberto can engage

in dialogue with the literary giants and talkback to Fidelas Lezama and Piera could notafford to doin large measure because foreignmarkets have opened to them and because aforeign readership has been particularly re-ceptive, in the post-Soviet era, to narratives ofdisillusionment with socialist politics. esedevelopments have made it possible for bothislanders and exiles to write for much the samereadership and to make similar arguments.

e disillusionment with the socialist project,

it would appear, is now shared by all. It is notonly possible now but politically meaningfuland commercially viable for writers to becomethe kind of resistant spectator that Diana

Taylor describes (21), possible and necessaryfor them to answer Castros political perfor-mances with their own. Jos Quiroga writes,In the introduction to his Teatro completo,Virgilio Piera remarked that no dramaticauthor could compete with the theatrical poseof Fidel Castro entering Havana [in 1959], ac-claimed by multitudes, adored by all (135).But as the collective enthusiasm faded and asCastros indefatigably optimistic political per-

formances increasingly strained credibility, itbecame possible for writers to compete with hispose, to counter his political-theatrical perfor-mances with texts that make performance itselfboth explicit subject matter and overarchingallegory. In reprotagonizing language, theyunderline narratives performative dimension.

Between a State and a Marketplace

It may be unfair to assume that because

much Soviet-era Cuban literaturesocial-ist realism, for example, or testimonial lit-eratureis said to privilege political criteriaabove all else, it tends to be not aesthetic orless aesthetic than more self-consciously lit-erary prerevolutionary or post-Soviet Cubanwriting. But this assumption is clearly madein a number of recent narrative texts and,for that matter, in some recent critical writ-ing. It is powerful and produces some star-

tling results. Appearing to reassert in literarywriting the primacy of aesthetic criteria overethical or political criteria, a number of post-Soviet narrative texts actually go a long wayin destabilizing the aesthetic category. Recenthistorico-narrative inquiries into the revolu-tions cultural politics dramatize, at the veryleast, the extent to which the category of theaesthetic is undertheorized, not only in so-cialist cultural discourse but also in a mod-

ernist discourse that sniffs at mass culture or



10/13

in celebrations of mass culture. Whether thework of Piera and Lezama is more aestheticthan or aesthetically superior to the work ofsuch writers as Manuel Cofio or Miguel Bar-

net is not as important here, in this essay, asthe fact that such judgments are more com-monly assumed than meaningfully argued.e very adequacy of aesthetic judgment toliterary writing may become suspect; we mayask, with Paul de Man, whether the equationof literariness with aesthetic response is notthe result of some fundamental confusion.

It is probably fitting that the coherence orintegrity of a reinscribed pre- or extrarevo-

lutionary aesthetic discourse should be sostrained in recent Cuban narrative. A combi-nation of historical and literary developmentsappear to force to the surface what has beenperplexing all along about the category of theaesthetic. Since its emergence in the eigh-teenth century, aesthetic discourse has beenriddled with contradiction. Terry Eagletonargues that although the aesthetic is insepa-rable from the construction of the dominantideological forms of modern class-society, and

indeed from a whole new form of human sub-jectivity appropriate to that social order, itnonetheless provides an unusually powerfulchallenge and alternative to these dominantideological forms (3). Eagletons narrativeof eighteenth-century thought may soundstrangely familiar in contemporary Cuba:

e emergence of the aesthetic as a theoreticalcategory is closely bound up with the material

process by which cultural production, at anearly stage of bourgeois society, becomes au-tonomousautonomous, that is, of the vari-ous social functions which it has traditionallyserved. Once artefacts become commoditiesin the market place, they exist for nothing andnobody in particular, and can consequently berationalized, ideologically speaking, as existingentirely and gloriously for themselves. (89)

e reassertion of a more traditional aesthetic

discourse in post-Soviet Cuba, a discourse

oen assumed to be apolitical, does indeedcoincide with the aesthetic artifacts newlyachieved autonomy from the states socialfunctions, with the reabsorption of this arti-

fact by a market economy, and with the emer-gence of a very small group of Cuban literaryentrepreneurson and off the islandwhountil the 1990s received essentially all theirincome from the Cuban state.

A modernist antimarket aesthetic sen-sibility may provide, in accordance with Ea-gletons narrative, a powerful challenge andalternative to [the] ideological forms domi-nant in Cuba and the world at large. Lezama

and Piera, for example, can represent astrategy of resistance to both the authoritar-ian state and the newly invigorated marketfor things Cuban. On one hand, these writ-ers were marginalized by the revolution andwere perhaps unincorporable to the islandscultural politics, at least until the mid-1980s.ey symbolize opposition to the discrimi-natory, authoritarian politics of the state. Onthe other hand, the Orgenes literary grouphas come to represent a Cuban high modern-

ism that thumbed its nose at the market, sothe group becomes a symbol of opposition onthat front too. eir challenge to the marketmay be undermined, however, by the fact thatthe recent texts in which Lezama and Pieraemerge as major figures are very much a partof the revived Cuban culture industry. eirchallenge to the state may be undermined,as Ponte points out, by the relatively recentappropriation of the Orgenes legacy by the

regime. One might conclude that the flourish-ing of a repressed aesthetic rhetoric in Cubanliterature goes hand in hand with the enerva-tion of socialist politics and the islands turntoward the market. ere would seem to be amatch between autonomous aesthetic objectsand freely exchanged commodities, despitethe aesthetes rejection of consumer culture.

The reinscription of more traditional,nonmilitant aesthetic discourse in recent

Cuban narrative also coincides with a crisis



11/13

for the international le. As some academicsconfess their disenchantment with metanar-ratives, revolutionary writing loses cachetin the First World university. As I indicated

earlier, a number of socialist realist authorsseem to have faded from the Cuban culturalimaginary altogether. Just as the socialistrevolutionary narrative grows pass for manyFirst World academics and young Cuban in-tellectuals alike; just as serious discussion ofthe revolutions socialist cultural project andits literary practitioners dries up in much

journalistic and academic writing around theworld; just as global capital, instead of finally

being contained, is more consolidated thanever; and just as the Cuban economy and itsculture industry appear about to be swal-lowed up by multinational corporations, anaesthetic sensibility with no ties to any oppo-sitional political praxisexcept perhaps forits prioritizing of art over the impositions ofthe stateseems to emerge as the paradigmof freedom for a significant number of Cubasmost admired writers. One begins to suspect,almost reflexively, that traditional aesthetic

discourse and market rationale are complicitaer all, that both art object and commoditymay be all too easily subsumed by the con-cept of free particulars, as Eagleton dem-onstrates (ch. 1).

As if the relation between aesthetic ideol-ogy and market ideology were not complicatedenough, we are dealing in Cubas case with apostcolonialor, rather, neocolonialsitua-tion. As long as books by Cubas best-known

contemporary writers off and on the island areeasier to acquire for the middle-class Spanishspeaker not living on the island or the FirstWorld scholar (e.g., through Amazon.com)than for even the best-educated and -paidCuban, authentic Cuban literary artifacts, itwould appear, are primarily for export. Cubanwriters off and on the island supply the liter-ary raw material, while the text is elaboratedinto a commodity abroad, more often than

not in the former metrpoli. e market seems

to have picked up in Cuba where the socialiststate le off, leaving no opportunity to thinkabout alternative cultural politics, alternativesystems of publishing and distribution, about

a possible third way. Orgenes may come torepresent such an alternative, in retrospect,but that paradigm is ultimately irretriev-able: there is no longer a literary aristocracyin Cuba, in the older, economic sense, no JosRodrguez Feo to foot the bill, as he did forthe Orgenes crowd. In terms of contemporarycultural praxis, the Orgenes revival (if it canbe called that) would seem to offer contem-porary Cuba little more than a fantasy about

a space for creative genius beyond state andmarket, a space in which political and eco-nomic exigencies are magically rendered irrel-evant. e space beyond all contingency mayhave been imaginary all along, but the fantasycan still be projected onto a prerevolutionaryliterary group that happened to include a mil-lionaire patron.

In recent Cuban writing, extrarevolu-tionary aesthetic discourse in general and ori-genista aesthetic discourse in particular are

not merely reinscribed but also resituated andreinflected. Cubas twentieth-century liter-ary icons and their aesthetic sensibilities aresituated diegetically in the Cuba of the 1960s,1970s, or 1980s, and reconstructed from a dis-tinctly post-1989 or postBerlin Wall vantage.e simple act of situating aesthetic discoursein a profoundly dialogic and historically rec-ognizable narrative context necessarily putsstress on the category of judgment, which was

conceived early on in terms of the presum-ably universal and ahistorical mental facul-ties of reason and understanding (see Kant).Situating a specific aesthetic subtradition,moreover, at the center of a historical powerstruggle between the artist and the politicianhas the effect of historicizing and material-izing what was never intended by Enlighten-ment philosophers to be framed in that way.

e theoretical inquiry urged by the re-

cent redeployment of such figures as Lezama



12/13

and Piera, I conclude, may be more pro-ductive than the symbolic opposition thesefigures have represented to existing culturalpolitics. Symbols of opposition are incorpo-

rated easily enough, aer all, by both the stateand the market, which is exactly what is hap-pening with Piera and Lezama today. Theredeployment of these icons in recent writingexplores in a manner unique to narrative thepotential for terror inscribed in the epic of so-cialist revolution, the potential for complicitywith the ruling class inscribed in much tradi-tional aesthetic discourse, and the emancipa-tory impulse common to both Cuban socialist

and traditional aesthetic discourses. As a dis-cursive medium that depends on antagonismfor its effect, narrative is uniquely suited todissecting these discourses, to laying baretheir social and historical contradictions, andto capitalizing on their progressive potential.

A great deal depends on whether criticsview these contradictions as repressed, be-cause unarticulated, or dramatized, becauseso evident. Either way, the relations betweenthe state and the arts, between political andaesthetic ideologies, and between indoctri-nation and entertainment are so persistentlyforegrounded in recent Cuban writing and sopersistently complicated by extratextual fac-tors, narrative structure, and discursive het-erogeneity that at the very least the texts placea responsibility on the readeron the literarycritic, the historian, the political theoristtoreexamine the fundamental social-culturalcontradictions that actually existing socialist

states and actually existing capitalist marketshave neglected. Literary texts will do nothingin themselves, of course, to mitigate or exac-erbate the neocolonization of Cuban culture,but if the narratives discussed here demon-strate one thing convincingly, it is that theliterary imagination and the political imagi-nation are mutually constitutive, regardlessof what a protagonist may think or a literaryicon represent. e politico-literary imagina-

tion is so constituted in narrative structure,

in fact, and narrative rendering so governedby performative criteria that a more sophis-ticated theorization of this categorical inter-

dependence is probably a precondition for a

more progressive cultural politics. It becomespainfully clear in post-Soviet Cuba, aer all,that neither releasing the literary artifactinto the free market nor subordinating it to

a univocal and thoroughly institutionalizedrevolutionary narrative has had the liberatingeffect these strategies promise.

NOTES

I am indebted to Daniel Balderston, Paul Apostolidis, and

Jos Buscaglia-Salgado for their insightful readings of earlier

versions of this essay and for their invaluable suggestions.

Casa de las Amricas was founded by Haydee Santa-mara in 1961 and serves as a center for research, a meeting-

house for writers, artists, and intellectuals, and a publisher

of books and magazines. It also awards literary and artisticprizes. e ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria

Cinematogrficos) was founded in 1961 to organize, fund,produce, and publicize Cuban cinema. Like Casa de las

Amricas it also publishes cultural magazines and awardsprizes. e UNEAC (Unin de Escritores y Artistas Cuba-

nos), a Cuban writers union founded in 1961 by Nicols

Guilln, is a cultural center and meetinghouse. It also pub-lishes books and magazines and awards literary prizes.

For an enthusiastic appraisal of Cubas cultural in-stitutions, see Jameson.

I borrow the term post-socialist from Romn de laCampas Cuba on My Mind(ch. 6).

Rivero is among the dissident journalists who wereimprisoned by the Cuban government in March 2003.

ere is no financial incentive to reprint even best-selling books, since sales do not cover the costs of publi-

cation and distribution.Unlike books and compact discs, films remain ac-

cessible in Cuba. Admission to a theater is generally two

pesos (about ten United States cents), perhaps a hun-

dredth of the average monthly salary. The Cuban film

industry, however, has been adversely affected by the loss

of Soviet subsidies. Fewer films are being made, and more

of those being made are coproductions, primarily with

Spain. Moreover, Cuba no longer has the means to buy

the rights to the great variety of international films it had

exhibited in the 1970s and 1980s.

For a critique of the mistificacin del hecho creadormystification of the creative act, see Collazos et al. 10.



13/13

A search for Manuel Cofio in theMLA Bibliography,for example, yields fourteen articles, only one of which was

written since 1990, and that article is a crit ique of com-mitted literature published in Encuentro, the magazine

discussed in the first pages of this article (Vzquez Daz).

If aesthetic experience is generally understood to de-rive from a concordance between object of contemplationand perceiving subject, it is difficult to imagine how the

art-as-weapon metaphor plays out. How do artist, audi-

ence, and the enemy implied by the metaphor gra onto

the art-weapon duality? Does a progressive work of art do

some kind of violence to a receptive audience? How mightit do violence to an indifferent or hostile audience?

None of these contemporary writers was publishingoutside Cuba before the late 1980s.

These entrepreneurs do not belong, it should bestressed, to a dominant socia l class. In spite of their rela-

tively good earnings, contemporary Cuban writers whoreside on the island and publish abroad are always at risk

of being marginalizedexpelled from such state insti-

tutions as the writers union (UNEAC) or actually im-

prisoned. eir earnings, in other words, do not translateinto political power or privilege.

One only need consider the spectacular successof Wim Wender and Ry Cooders documentaryBuena

Vista Social Club and its Grammy-winning compact disc

to sense the potential for a remarketing of the old Cuba,

now dilapidated, for the new tourist.

WORKS CITED

Alberto, Eliseo. Informe contra m mismo. Madrid: Al-

faguara, 1996.

Buena Vista Social Club. Dir. Wim Wenders. Road Mov-

ies Filmproduktion, 1999.

Campa, Romn de la. Cuba on My Mind: Journeys to a

Severed Nation. London: Verso, 2000.

Carpentier, Alejo. Prologue. Dos novelas. La Habana: Le-tras Cubanas , 1979. 511.

Castro, Fidel. Discurso de clausura. Casa de las Amri-cas 6566 (1971): 2133.

. Palabras a los intelectuales. La Habana: Consejo

Nacional de Cultura, 1961.

Collazos, Oscar, et al. Literatura en la revolucin y revo-

lucin en la literatura. Mxico, DF: Siglo XXI, 1970.

de Man, Paul. e Resistance to eory. e Resistance to

eory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 320.Daz, Jess. De fiesta. Encuentro 89 (1998): 34.

. Las palabras perdidas. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1992.

Eagleton, Terry. e Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge:Blackwell, 1990.

Guevara, Ernesto. El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba.

El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba. New York: Path-

finder, 1992. 5171.

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Aesthetics and t he Funda-

mentals of Modernity.Aesthetics and Ideology. New

Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. 12449.

Jameson, Fredric. Foreword. Caliban and Other Essays.

By Roberto Fernndez Retamar. Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1989. viixii.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Philosophical

Writings. Ed. Ren Wellek. New York: Continuum,1991. 127246.

Padilla, Heberto. Fuera del juego. Miami: Universal, 1998.

Padura, Leonardo.Mscaras. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1997.

.Modernidad , posmodernidad y novela policial. La

Habana: Unin, 2000.

. Paisaje de otoo. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1998.

Paz, Senel. El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo. Mxico,

DF: Era, 1991.

Piera, Virgilio. Cuentos fros. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1956.. Teatro completo. La Habana: R, 1960.

Ponte, Antonio Jos. El libro perdido de los origenistas.

Mxico, DF: Aldus, 2002.

Quiroga, Jos. Homosexualities in the Tropic of Revolu-tion. Sex and Sexuality in Latin America. Ed. Daniel

Balderston and Donna J. Guy. New York: New YorkUP, 1997. 13351.

Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts. Durham: Duke UP,1997.

Vzquez Daz, Ren. Crtica de la literatura como com-

promiso: La cuentstica de Manuel Cofio. Encuen-

tro de la cultura cubana 1 (1996): 10712.


Buckwalter-Arias Re Inscribing the Aesthetic

Documents

Transcript of Buckwalter-Arias Re Inscribing the Aesthetic