Apertura comercial

Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

Walter Benjamin (1936)

I had the misfortune of getting mixed up in politics. Fernando Ortiz (1942)

1.

I began the last chapter with an epigraph from and corresponding discussion of Walter Benjamin’s ambivalent engagement with Surrealist activities in Paris between his arrival there in 1929 and his flight from the city in 1940. My subsequent discussion of Alejo Carpentier’s famous prologue to his 1949 novel, El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of This World], demonstrated that references to Benjamin with regard to early-twentieth- century Cuban intellectual discourse serve as more than theoretical invocations. While

‘Benjaminian thought’ functions as an increasingly common touchstone within contemporary criticism, Carpentier’s prologue—as another critical response to Surrealism’s efforts “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution”—shows that the debate over “theory” between Benjamin and Adorno moved in a circuit of discourse through which Cuban considerations of magic and modernity also passed. Benjamin’s and Carpentier’s texts were

contemporaneous and coincidental, and their correspondences in time and theme reveal direct historical connections between today’s popular ‘Benjaminian’ and ‘magical realist’ critical postures.

In this chapter, I continue to explore those historical connections in order to illustrate how the links between the European avant-garde and Cuban intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s went far beyond Benjamin and Carpentier and their mutual engagements with French Surrealism. I provide an historical frame that shows the degree to which Carpentier’s

prologue emerged out of and exemplified a more general Cuban intellectual dynamic. In fact, the ongoing engagement with the European avant-garde defined the discourse of displacing magic all along. In that regard, Carpentier’s prologue from the late 1940s stands as a more recent example enabled by critical developments of the 1930s. As I highlight in this chapter and in those that follow, it was in responding critically to the activities of the European avant-garde during the 1930s that Cuban intellectuals began to articulate more clearly an interventionist politics based on truthful “documentation” of Latin American history and culture. Carpentier subsequently formalized this idea by calling in his prologue for

“chronicles of the marvelous in the real.” In the current chapter, I focus especially on how Carpentier’s stance—clearly a politics rooted in the aesthetics of particular kind of

“chronicle”—reflects a general retreat after 1933 of Cuban intellectuals from direct modes of political engagement into a more clandestine ‘politics of culture.’

And, from that standpoint, the similarities and differences between Cuban and European intellectual activities during the period are so telling. On one hand, the Cubans’ reliance on “culture” as intervention paralleled European developments during a decade of rising conservative, or openly fascist, political tides in Latin America as well as in Europe.

Intellectuals in both regions looked more often toward culture when confronted with shrinking spheres of traditional politics. Perhaps nothing indicates the transcontinental common ground among intellectuals of the period better than the actual ground across which many of them moved. In other words, many intellectuals—Latin American and European alike—were forced into flight. In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, they found themselves suddenly, and often unexpectedly, displaced.

On the other hand, the trajectories of the politics of culture diverged as the Latin Americans—drawing on but also reacting to the European avant-garde—turned to modernist

realism,that is, to “aesthetic theatricalizations” and “chronicles” of their region’s marvelous ‘realities.’ The Society for Afro-Cuban Studies materialized in this historical context among Cuban intellectuals, many of whom were physically displaced at one time or another

beginning in the late 1920s and for whom the discourse of displacing magic operated as a unique and seemingly necessary political strategy. As a way to outline these historical

developments, let me once again turn to Alejo Carpentier’s story by way of Walter Benjamin.

2.

In addition to certain correspondences in time and theme, another significant parallel arises from Walter Benjamin’s and Alejo Carpentier’s engagements with Surrealist activities. As mentioned in the last chapter, both of those projects stem from the two writers’

coincidence of place. For both men, that concurrence also arose from a mutual experience of displacement. They arrived in Paris around the same time—1928 in Carpentier’s case; 1929 for Benjamin—in trying to escape perceived threats to their lives amidst the political ferment embroiling their native countries. Carpentier came from Havana after a stint in jail for

involvement in leftist political protests while Benjamin, a non-religious Jew, arrived from Berlin in the hopes of finding more work and relief from the rising tide of anti-Semitism. And just as political uncertainty at home led them to Paris, so too did it force them into flight from the city: Carpentier and Benjamin each remained there for around eleven years and then left within months of each other as the likelihood of Nazi occupation of Paris increased.

It was during those last months in Paris that Benjamin composed his famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In the text, Benjamin imagined a mode of philosophy that could unsettle the growing forces of oppression at work at that moment. “It is our task to bring about a real state of emergency,” he writes, “and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism” (Benjamin 1968: 257). For Benjamin, “historical materialism” operates as the catalyst to this “state of emergency.” But, in his view, “historical

materialism” has to make a surprise move. It has to overcome escape the limitations of modern rationalism that ground critical historiography. “ ‘Historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which, as we know, is wizened and keeps out of sight” (253).

Through this image of a “‘historical materialism’” that “enlists the services of theology,” Benjamin hoped to address the urgent situation that he had marked in closing another essay from 1936. In a now-familiar conclusion to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin summarizes a key point of his argument: that after Kant, the aesthetic powers of humans have become the primary object of their own reflection. According to Benjamin, this solipsism has led to a dangerous form of “self- alienation”: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can

experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Benjamin 1968: 242). He interprets his contemporary socio-political environment accordingly. “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic,” he decries. In other words, the Nazis and other Fascists had turned politics into a gruesome aesthetic spectacle that the public witnessed as spectators, as if they were not actually participants. From Benjamin’s standpoint, the necessary response is evident: “Communism responds by politicizing art.” “Communism”—by which Benjamin figures a viable opposition to Fascism—takes up “art,” or culture more generally, as a “political” tool to counteract the aestheticization of politics. Social revolution depended upon the politicization of cultural endeavors.

Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” sets forth terms by which that revolutionary project should proceed. His call for a theologically savvy “‘historical

materialism’” that would “bring about a real state of emergency” and “improve our position in the struggle against Fascism” points to the mobilization of historical images—

historiography as “art”—as a way to invoke alternatives to current or familiar realities. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Benjamin referred to interventionist representation as “dialectical images.” In the last passages of the “Theses,” Benjamin links “dialectical” critical historiography with a kind of “magic” in which time—the very framework of our endeavors—assumes significance neither as “homogenous” nor “empty” (264). Those hollow experiences of time pervade modernity, Benjamin suggest, and the recovery of a theological sensibility by “historical materialism” would counteract the pull of “Fascism” by infusing modern life with a sense of “Messianic” import. People would recover a fuller, much-needed sense of significance to their actions.

Undoubtedly, Benjamin’s ideas about “politicizing art” as a counter-“Fascist” project were unique. Still, as I considered in the last chapter, his thinking was part of a wider circuit of discourse. As suggested by his 1938 exchange with Adorno, Benjamin’s essays from the late 1930s bear the clear marks of Surrealism. He echoes the explicit objectives of Surrealist endeavors by gesturing towards a politicized art that “enlists the services of theology” and, in so doing, verges on “magic.” Once again, Benjamin’s 1929 characterization of Surrealism could be applied to his own expressed goals for a politics of culture: “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution.”

3.

From that perspective, the correspondences between Benjamin’s and Carpentier’s histories intensify and make the juxtaposition of their work all the more illuminating. In some respects, Carpentier’s thinking as he fled Paris moved along a trajectory parallel to Benjamin’s work. During the months that Benjamin was working on “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Carpentier also was busy with a Surrealist-inflected project with theological overtones. In his own set of theses, he imagined an urgently needed personal and social spiritual revitalization catalyzed by the production of transforming images along the lines of Benjamin’s “dialectical images.” Carpentier, whose political involvements in the late 1920s forced him to run to Paris in the first place, left the city a decade later to arrive at a his own call for a politics of culture that would circumvent a sphere of traditional political activism that seemingly had closed by late 1939.

But if the various correspondences between the physical and intellectual flights of the displaced German and the displaced Cuban in 1939 are striking, the differences in their

movements were also critical. Most immediately, Benjamin’s escape from Paris ended in death by his own hand on the French-Spanish border while Carpentier’s getaway from the city and its intellectual circles became for him the multifaceted rebirth in America that he would textualize almost a decade later in The Kingdom of This World and its prologue. Invigorated by an arrival in Havana that was at once a break from and return to the origins of his French-born, Cuban-located family, Carpentier went on to produce all of the major work in his long and illustrious career. And, as we have already seen, Carpentier’s physical relocation to the Americas led him to an engagement with Surrealism that, by virtue of its insistence on “chronicles” of the Americas, diverged from Benjamin’s call for a mode of illuminating historiography that was not necessarily limited to a particular hemisphere. The explicit Americanism of Carpentier’s work of the late 1940s appeared to germinate with his return to Cuba.

One of the first projects that Carpentier undertook upon his arrival back on the island in 1939 was a series of articles for Carteles, a leading cultural journal, entitled “La Habana vista por un turista cubana” [Havana Seen By a Cuban Tourist].25 The articles clearly echo prominent Surrealist literature, like Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris (1926) and Breton’s ‘Paris trilogy’ [Nadja (1928), Les vases communicants (1932), and L'amour fou (1937)]. As in those texts, Carpentier wanders familiar urban terrain and discovers its “marvels,” that is, those surprising and previously unrecognized elements embedded in the history and contours of the city’s landscape. “An eleven year absence indisputably confers upon anyone returning to his country the soul of a tourist,” Carpentier observes in the first installment.

25

The five articles were published at two-week to month-long intervals between October 9 and December 17, 1939.

One places oneself before one’s own things—those that were the setting of childhood and a complement to adolescent dreams—with new eyes and a spirit free from prejudice. Besides, wanderings through other lands bring to mind more than one point of reference and comparison […]. And spurred by a new curiosity, the spectator in his own home feels impelled to revise values, to revitalize old conceptions, to visit carefully the neighborhood that long ago appeared uninteresting, to explore the street that he never crossed before.26 With those “new eyes and a spirit free from prejudice,” Carpentier takes up a familiar Surrealist posture as he comes to recognize the hidden code written all over Havana in elements that he and others had always considered mundane under the familiar light of reason. The numbers on lottery tickets and the names of cafés point Carpentier toward another register of truth on which a new social order might be founded.

In that regard, “Havana Seen By a Cuban Tourist” also echoes the Baudelaire poems that, as Benjamin had studied, so forcefully reverberate through the Surrealist texts.

Carpentier exposes the “magic” residing in the colonial structures that draw “tourists” like him. Like the “magic cobblestones” that Baudelaire encountered in Paris, Old Havana’s buildings—and the city and the country more generally—rest on the invisible powers of the slave labor that produced them. But Carpentier’s drive “to revise values, to revitalize old conceptions,” only follows from his “wanderings through other lands.” He already gestures in 1939 toward the explicit break he would make ten years later: the full magic of modernity does not surface in every urban context but rather only in a specific place like Havana. In walking through that Latin American city born of European colonialism, two truths about the modern system magically appear: that it depends on forced labor as well as on the

obfuscation of that dependence.

Thus, the first passages of “Havana Seen By a Cuban Tourist” already encapsulate the key paradox of Carpentier’s 1949 prologue: his ability to differentiate forms of “the

marvelous American reality” and of its “magic” stems from the modern European aesthetic modes with which he purportedly breaks. The Carteles series shows that Carpentier, in positioning himself as “the spectator in his own home,” could only recognize the hidden truths in his formative environment and about himself through distance from them (“one places oneself before one’s own things” after “wandering through other lands”). Still, what compels him “to revise values” is his adoption of Europe’s “old conceptions” through which to understand Havana and its people. In this way, Carpentier assumes the classic posture of twentieth-century Cuban intellectual discourse. In 1939, he already begins to turn to a displacing magic born of displacement. His paradoxical reliance on ostensibly displaced modern terms in claiming a different modernity for Latin America repeats the defining double-gesture of the discourse of displacing magic.

What is most unique in Carpentier’s case is the timing of the change. In the rest of this chapter and the sections of the dissertation that follow, I show that by 1939—when Carpentier returned to Havana—the ambivalent shift in positions toward the European avant- garde was already firmly in place in Cuban intellectual discourse. The textual exchange between Lachatañeré and Ortiz—carried out around the same time as Carpentier’s Carteles

series, immediately after Lachatañeré had taken flight fromHavana—indicates that by the late 1930s other Cuban intellectuals had preceded Carpentier in trying to reconfigure the avant-garde quest for socially transforming experiences as a new politics of culture.

Carpentier would codify the move in The Kingdom of This World and its prologue, but during the later 1930s other Cuban intellectuals took up magic—implicitly in some cases and

explicitly in others—in searching for the magic of ‘authentic’ presentations of Latin American historical and cultural realities.

4.

Despite his expressed sense of intellectual and spiritual rejuvenation upon his 1939 homecoming, Carpentier’s experience after his return to Havana is marked by dislocation. It would take Carpentier’s various physical displacements for him arrive by the late 1940s at the critically displacing formulations of Europe’s “cheap magicians” with his own textual magic. He remained in Cuba until 1945, when he moved to Caracas to begin the work in public relations with Publicidad Ars. He returned to Cuba only occasionally over the next fourteen years until his return to the island in 1959, shortly after the Revolution, in order to direct some book fairs planned in 1958 by the Peru-based Organización Continental de los Festivales del Libro [Continental Organization for Festivals of Books].27 During the 1940s— with Havana and then Caracas as home base—Carpentier traveled throughout Latin America, in some cases for extended periods. He further explored Cuba, especially its eastern sections in and around Santiago. In 1943, he took the trip to Haiti during which—if his 1949 prologue is to be believed—he suddenly perceived the marvelous American reality.28 In 1944 he

27_{See González-Echevarría 1990: 213f. for details on Carpentier’s 1959 return to Cuba. In August}

1961, he was named executive director of Cuba’s Editorial Nacional [National Publishing House]. In 1967, Carpentier moved to Paris as a cultural attaché for the Cuban government. In an ironic—but perhaps telling— twist on his deep but ambivalent relations with that city of his and his parents’ youths, he maintained his primary residence there until his death in 1980.

28_{According to interviews and press clippings, Carpentier joined the French actor Louis Jouvet and his}

company on its tour of Haiti. The Haïti-Journal reported in late December of 1943 on two lectures that Carpentier, identified as “Cultural Attaché of the Government of Havana,” delivered at the Paramount Theater in Port-au-Prince on “The Cultural Evolution of Latin America” (González-Echevarría 1990: 101n10).

traveled through Mexico on vacation. In 1947 and again in 1948 he undertook prolonged research trips along the Orinoco River and through the jungles of Venezuela.

Still, with all of his movement between locales during the 1940s, perhaps

Carpentier’s most significant transition was his original passage to France in 1928. That initial dislocation was spurred by national and international events that transformed Cuban