4.5: Exporting Era and Hispano-American Modernism

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In the last decades of the 19th century, many Spanish-American countries focused their economic development around one or two export products, thus experiencing a period of relative prosperity and political stability. This generated a growth of the middle classes and urban centers. Part of the Latin American elite evolved into an exporting bourgeoisie, characterized by greater entrepreneurial impetus, valuing efficiency, technical innovation, and commercial success. Social and intellectual production then had to engage with this modernizing ideology —inspired by European and American prototypes of progress—while simultaneously seeking to assert its own models in the fields of thought and social organization. The painting on the left, by the Uruguayan Carlos Federico Sáez, illustrates this image of financial and urban modernization: a taste for elegance and a certain exoticism that characterized part of the aesthetics of this period, which is known as “Spanish-American modernism”.

“Portrait of Mr. J.C.M.” (1899), by Carlos Federico Sáez (Uruguay 1878-1901). Carlos Federico Sáez, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Export Boom

In the second half of the 19th century, many Spanish-American countries reorganized their economies around the export opportunities that opened up with the European Industrial Revolution. Cities in northwestern Europe were growing rapidly, and their demand for agricultural products increased. Expanding industries required greater quantities of raw materials, and commercial activity sought new markets. Many European investors partnered with Latin American merchants and entrepreneurs to capitalize on these opportunities.

After strong regional tensions between elites with different interests (especially between landlords who sought to preserve the rural economy and merchants who favored economic liberalism), in the last decades of the 19th century, many Latin American countries specialized in exporting specific products to France and England, and little by little to the United States, such as coffee from Brazil, meat and wool from Argentina, copper from Chile or sugar from Cuba, among others. At the same time, almost all textiles, machines, armaments and luxury items were imported at high prices, making local economies dependent on international banks and foreign investors. There was a trend towards the “Europeanization” of cultural production, as it was seen as a means of integrating into the civilized world, particularly for the majority of the educated elite. Many governments, within this mentality, favored European immigration and English or French investment in banking and infrastructure.

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Hispanic-American Modernism

In the 1880s, a group of works that represented a unique aesthetic mix previously unseen in Spanish art began to emerge and were later grouped together under the label of “Hispanic-American Modernism” (approximately 1880-1920). This literary and artistic trend, more closely associated with poetry, was described as “modernist” because it was innovative in style and posed a tense dialogue with the new sensibilities and values of bourgeois society, urban life, and the introduction of exoticism. It is important to note that this “Hispanic-American Modernism” predates and differs from Brazilian modernism (1920s) and European and North American “Modernism” (1900-30); these last two correspond more to what in the Hispanic tradition is known as “vanguard” (avant-garde).

One of the first authors to be associated with Modernism today is the Cuban José Martí, who in 1892 synthesized the need for an art that responds to the changes of the time: “Nobody has their faith secure today. New blood is boiling in everyone and they are angry and hungry, by Insecurity, Vague Hope, and Secret Vision” (“Prologue to the Niagara Poem”, 1892). These are the intensity and restlessness of modernist aesthetics that reject immediate circumstances. Underlying their “Vague Hope” is an enthusiasm for idealistic values, contrasting with the utilitarian simplification of existence associated with capitalism. In contrast, a “Secret Vision” is explored to capture the mystery, the “aura” of life or “the inner kingdom” that cannot be reduced to scientific or economic formulas. Their “Insecurity” is related to the socioeconomic, ethical and cognitive debates generated by the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America. To aesthetically elaborate this crisis of trust in bourgeois positivism, modernist authors develop new formal techniques of symbolism and poetic diction that aim to embody alternative ideals, especially that of beauty: art as a way to save humanity from social mechanization.

Although opposing rationalism has a lot of (neo) romantic, Spanish-American Modernism no longer focuses on representing ideas or emotions as in the past, but on communicating sensations (Shaw 196). This revitalizes and transforms the modes of poetic expression in Spanish, proposing a “heteroclite sum of styles through whose integration the varied, confusing and even contradictory spirit of an entire era is manifested: that of the end of the 19th century” (Jiménez 19). In effect, this aesthetic trend is a syncretism of styles that, in Europe, had been successive or divorced, and in their dramatic mixture, results in a unique and distinctive product, to a certain extent comparable to the racial and cultural melting pot that characterizes Latin American societies. In their mix, modernists affirm the Spanish-American by creating models that broke with those of the Spanish poetry of their time, expressing “a desire for cultural autonomy and the desire to achieve a feeling of equality” with their counterparts in Western Europe (Jrade 37). 

And this was the most striking thing for his time: he freely incorporated, in Spanish, the innovative literary techniques of France, crystallizing his own dynamic style. This can be summarized in the following characteristics:

• fascination with the beautiful or the precious understood as formal perfection, finesse and exoticism;
• search for the ideal, elaborate, elegant and harmonious expression;
• high sophistication of the style, emphasizing musicality, feel, innovation;
• trust in the saving power of art, with its ritual value as a refuge and protest against consumerist or mechanized societies that devalue the poet and the human being;
• elaboration of existential puzzles and non-rational experiences;
• search for an expression “proper” or distinctive to Latin America and a feeling of solidarity between their countries and authors.

The movement can be divided into two distinct periods, each with its own characteristics. A first group of poets, who today can be classified as “early modernism”, seem romantic in their nationalist and tragic impulse. However, rather than romantic emotions, they explore sensations (physical and metaphysical) as an alternative mode of knowledge. This trend is observed, for example, in the first stanzas of the poem “My mourners” (1890) by the Mexican Manuel Gutierrez Nájera (Jiménez 108):

Sadness descends taciturn to the bottom of my soul, and numb, ragged witches, with black nails, they dig into my life. Blood is the color of their pupils, their tears are snow; deep dread they instill... I love them because they are the only ones that accompany me. (v. 1-10

Descienden taciturnas las tristezas al fondo de mi alma, y entumecidas, haraposas brujas,          con uñas negras          mi vida escarban. De sangre es el color de sus pupilas, de nieve son sus lágrimas; hondo pavor infunden... Yo las amo          por ser las solas          que me acompañan. (v. 1-10)

Here, emotions (sadness), although important, are used to develop correspondences between perceptions — black nails, the color of blood, tears of snow — that go beyond the expression of the speaker's individual feelings: they are a way of knowing. It is also not difficult to establish a connection with the “gothic” of nineteenth-century authors such as Edgar Allan Poe (who was the inspiration for French symbolism). The form is flexible, with an assonant rhyme that seeks a music that is inherent in the language itself.

The four most famous names of this first modernist generation are José Martí (Cuba 1853-95), Manuel Gutierrez Nájera (Mexico 1859-95), Julián del Casal (Cuba 1863-93) and José Asunción Silva (Colombia 1865-96).

A second group of authors, whom we can classify as “high modernism,” distances itself more from Romanticism, preferring form over feeling. What is important to them is the design of rhythms, symbols, and themes that develop the pure, ideal beauty and meaning of existence against the capitalist materialism or positivist simplification. The author most associated with this second generation is the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916). Its great symbol is the swan, whose whiteness and elegance represented the poetic ideal, and whose neck, shaped like a question mark, represented the enigma of existence (see Shaw). The sonnet “The Swan”, published in 1896, summarizes these interests:

It was at a divine hour for mankind. The swan used to sing only to die. When the accent of the Wagnerian Swan was heard, it was in the middle of an aurora, it was to revive. Over the storms of the human ocean you can hear the swan song; you keep hearing, dominating the hammer of the old German Thor or the trumpets that sing the sword of Argantir. Oh Swan! Oh sacred bird! If before the white Helen in Leda's blue egg sprouted with full grace, and Beauty was the immortal princess, Under your white wings, the new Poetry conceives in a glory of light and harmony the eternal and pure Helena that embodies the ideal.

Fue en una hora divina para el género humano. El cisne antes solo cantaba para morir. Cuando se oyó el acento del Cisne wagneriano fue en medio de una aurora, fue para revivir. Sobre las tempestades del humano oceano se oye el canto del Cisne; no se cesa de oír, dominando el martillo del viejo Thor germano o las trompas que cantan la espada de Argantir. ¡Oh Cisne! ¡Oh sacro pájaro! Si antes la blanca Helena del huevo azul de Leda brotó de gracia llena, siendo de la Hermosura la princesa inmortal, bajo tus blancas alas la nueva Poesía concibe en una gloria de luz y de harmonía la Helena eterna y pura que encarna el ideal.

This “high modernism” tends to prefer exoticism, but some of its exponents return to civic themes and highlight the pride of being from Latin America, in an ideology that is known as Americanism or Mundonovism (pride of the New World, America). Other poets of this second modernist generation are Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Bolivia 1868-1933), José Juan Tablada (Mexico 1871-1945), Guillermo Valencia (Colombia 1873-1943), b (Argentina 1874-1938), José María Eguren (Peru 1874-1942), Julio Herrera y Reissig (Uruguay 1875-1910), José Santos Chocano (Peru 1875-1934) and Delmira Agustini (Uruguay 1886-1914).

 

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[1] Parnasianism: a trend of poetry in the 19th century that rejected the emotional excesses of Romanticism and defended formal perfection and “art for art's sake” (the idea that art has value in itself and does not need to justify its usefulness). Its name comes from Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses in Greek mythology (inspirers of music and poetry). Her concept of beauty is associated with fine, exotic, or precious objects (such as swans, marble, and the Far East). Two famous French Parnassians are Théophile Gautier (1811-72) and Charles Leconte de Lisle (1818-94).

[2] Symbolism: a poetic trend from the end of the 19th century, characterized by free verse, sophisticated musicality, interest in the mysterious or the mystical, and the construction of subjective and ambiguous symbols to evoke emotions through synesthesia (correspondence between the sensory world and the interior). It was a reaction against the formal perfectionism of the Parnassians, and it understood art as a means of knowing metaphysical or psychological realities. Four famous French symbolists are Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), Paul Verlaine (1844-96) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91).

 

 

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Romanticism vs. Spanish-American Modernism

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Fuentes

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• Davies, Catherine, ed. The Companion to Hispanic Studies. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Frank, Jean. History of Spanish-American literature. Barcelona: Ariel, 1983.

• Jimenez, Jose Olivio. Critical anthology of Spanish-American modernist poetry. Madrid: Hyperion, 1989.

• Fuck off, Cathy. “Modernist poetry”. History of Spanish-American literature. Ed. Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria and Enrique Pupo-Walker. Trad. Ana Santonja Querol and Consuelo Triviño Anzola. Madrid: Gredos, 2006. 37-94.

• Shaw, Donald L. “Modernism: A Contribution to the Debate.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 44 (1967): 195-202.

• Winn, Peter. Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean. 4th ^ed. Berkeley: U of California, 2005.