II.2.5 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 832276
(1) I BELIEVE THE SURVEY IS ERRONEOUSLY FORMULATED, and [this is] particularly [evident coming from] an avant-garde magazine: revista de avance. No duties should be imposed upon art. Not even sincerity—which seems to be of the same substance—may be defined so as to impose it as a duty upon art. Because even sincerity—which is only a human aspiration, a postulate—follows human evolution closely. . . . I am deeply interested, however, in the premise lurking beneath the survey…
(2) American art…? Let us see. Is there already in the word “American” enough adjectival weight to modify to a noticeable degree the concept of art? North Americans, who attribute to themselves the genuine representation of AMÉRICA, have the frontier, the pioneer, Puritanism: a wide hotbed of rebellion, industrialism. Yesterday, it was man against nature; today, it is the mechanization of life against the individual. Something at least. [The North American authors] Bret Harte, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser, for instance, owe very little to London or Paris. Babbit [by Sinclair Lewis] can only be North American. Eugene O’Neill experiments even with Marco Polo [in his play Marco Millions], but keeps using material made in the U.S.A.
(3) . . . Argentineans claim [their] pampas, the Mexicans their Indians, our Antilles the tragedy of our utter hopelessness. We have lived for a century taking to heart the saviors of our homelands and singing to Lola, to Teresa, and to Enriqueta. It is unworthy. Thus [Rubén] Darío, [Enrique Rodríguez] Larreta, and Diego Rivera, for example, found themselves thanks to Europe and made their names resound beyond their own frontiers. Our Galatea-América is still petrified. . . .
With the relative exception of Buenos Aires, our urban centers are sparsely populated. Our culture suffers of Jesuitism: intense among those favored by the fortune, sparse or nonexistent among the others in God’s flock. And our little [childlike] nineteenth-century homelands always carefully keep their closed circle of national glories. . . .
Dilemma: art is produced either for the local public and is consequently debased, or it is done for other artists—continental or local—with the lethal harpoon of mystification buried in our guts. . . . Any artistic manifestation is closely related to the density of population and to its cultural and financial homogeneity: in other words, to purely economic causes. And those economic causes, which send scared shivers down the backs of our lyrical critics—are not exorcised with pretty speechifying. . . .
Our [independence fighter] Manuel Sanguily—admiring the ability of the mambi1 to regroup into the core of their strength after a defeat in battle—created the ironic sense of dispersed order. Scattered as we live [in America], we will never be able to create great and enduring work.
On the other hand, the language…
Our language is a dying language. It is in fact dying of literary abundance, of abortive lyrics. Today the world thinks and acts in English. Those of us who write in Spanish cannot shake a touch of sadness, as though we wrote from jail or exile. The exceptions turn out to be worse, because some live in limbo and others inject themselves with the heroic drug of mutual loud acclamation. Or they close their eyes to their evident isolation, their historical innocuousness.
(4) A negative conclusion?
Not at all. If some day, for purely economic reasons, I hasten the end of my life, I know that I will not blame the world at all. I will always believe it to be my fault, our fault. The world cannot be otherwise. And that is all right.
The artist who best encompasses the antinomies of art in our America will benefit more from them than the most gifted European does from his traditional advantages. Besides, Europe is a museum, an excellent workshop. Why not use it too? Are we perhaps going to earnestly take into account the dogs that, having been born inside the museum, are in the habit of barking at visitors? Our true spiritual brothers are already offering it to us, wholeheartedly.
In any case, Americanness is not an individual condition; it should not be conceived as a limitation, regardless of whether it is related to optics, to content, or to means. It may be all of that and even much less: it may be a mere illusion, a mirage.
What matters is to work, to create, to act. Everything we do today, not only in art but in all human activities as well, will be what will truly determine our Americanness. . . .
1
The “mambises” were insurgents of colonial Cuba who rebelled against the domination of Spain.—Ed.