Two Rereading Spanish American Classics
Novels published by Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, Federico Gamboa, Mariano Azuela, José Rafael Pocaterra, and Manuel Gálvez suggest the major directions for the Spanish American novel during this period, including the modernistas and the positivists. Díaz Rodríguez’s Sangre patricia (1902) was one of the most outstanding examples of modernista fiction; Gamboa’s Santa (1903) and José Rafael Pocaterra’s Política feminista (1913) were remnants of nineteenth-century realism-naturalism; Azuela’s Los de abajo (1916) represented realism in the most classic novel of the Mexican Revolution; Gálvez’s El mal metafísico (1916) is also of the realist-naturalist mode but was an example of the interior, psychological type of fiction being written in this period. All five novelists participated in the ongoing struggle of the Latin American writer to establish an identity for the novel and, just as important, as novelists of their respective nations.1 At the same time, it has been argued that these writers were representative of a masculinist aesthetic that was typical of the period.2
The modernistas’ desire to be modern meant rejecting what they viewed as a traditional society populated by individuals interested in crude materialism devoid of any appreciation for the spiritual and the philosophical. For these writers, the novels of the realist-naturalist tradition were in part designed to set forth this assessment of the status quo. Consequently, for Díaz Rodríguez, the novels of writers such as Gamboa did not represent an acceptable approach to artistic creation. The reaction of these modernistas, then, was a hyper-aestheticism. Four of the five novelists discussed in this chapter offer a similar conclusion—that life is marked by futility—even though they differ considerably among themselves in most other aspects of worldview. The modernistas tended to reject many of the excesses of romanticism, yet they remained most committed to the romantics’ yearning for the unattainable.
The protagonist of Díaz Rodríguez’s Sangre patricia, twenty-five-year-old Tulio Arcos of Venezuela, is a fictionalized manifestation of this yearning as he constantly attempts to transcend everyday reality in search of something beyond his reach. Sangre patricia is not a novel of action in the traditional sense; instead it portrays Tulio in Paris waiting for the arrival of the exotic female other (Belén), whom he has married by proxy. She dies en route from Venezuela, however, and is buried at sea. After lengthy philosophical discussions at sea about life, society, and his sorrow over the absence of Belén, he commits suicide during his voyage home from Paris by leaping off the ship and into the sea.
Although Díaz Rodríguez is interested in the psychological development of characters, Brushwood points out that Tulio’s problem of adjustment is more philosophical than psychological.3 Two different philosophical outlooks on life are personified by Tulio’s friends: Borja the idealist and Ocampo the pragmatist. The embodiment of the middle ground between these two is a musician, Martí, who stands out as both a creator and an individual capable of dealing with social institutions.
The first chapter of Sangre patricia introduces Tulio and reveals that Belén has died. The opening pages focus on one topic: exotic feminine beauty in its ideal form as embodied by Belén. She is described in the opening line as a presencia milagrosa, and her physical beauty is such that, in good modernista fashion, it even affects the passengers on the ship: “la admiración por la belleza de Belén cambió de carácter en casi todos los viajeros” (admiration for Belén’s beauty changed the nature of nearly all the passengers).4 In accordance with the modernista search for the unattainable and transcendent, her characterization emphasizes “algo sobrenatural y misterioso” (something supernatural and mysterious) (Sangre patricia, 11). In the passengers’ lament of her death, their grief seems to stem as much from the loss of this beauty as from the loss of a human life. Her burial at sea is portrayed not as a religious ceremony but as a modernista aesthetic act in which the urn is lowered into a blue sea under blue skies. This aesthetic act, which is described in three paragraphs, culminates with this “fruit of beauty” descending miraculously into the depths of the sea: “Ya por milagro, como pensaron unos, ya por mala dispocisión del peso, como creyeron los más, la caja, descendida hasta el agua, quedó algún tiempo a flote: al fin se inclinó de un lado, luego del otro, y la mar cerró su boca insaciable y azul sobre aquel fruto de belleza” (Whether by a miracle, as some thought, or by poor weight distribution, as the others believed, the coffin as it descended into the water floated for some time: finally it leaned to one side, then the other, and the sea closed its insatiable blue mouth over that fruit of beauty; Sangre patricia, 14). In this passage, the narrator recognizes implicitly the existence of the two worldviews in constant play in the novel: on the one hand, the idealists and aesthetes who observe a milagro; on the other hand, the pragmatists of scientific worldview who notice the distribution of the physical weight in the coffin as it wobbles on the water before sinking. The omniscient narrator of this passage thus recognizes both worldviews yet seems to associate more closely with the aesthetic position: he describes the act first as a milagro and chooses to describe the descending corpse as a fruto de belleza disappearing into the blue sea. Debicki has pointed to two positions of the omniscient narrator that correspond to these two worldviews.5 Nevertheless, the narrator does seem to identify more closely with the aesthetic and modernista view of the world. The reader associates with Tulio for a technical reason: he frequently functions as the focalizer through whom the fictional world is seen. Throughout the novel, in accordance with its masculinist aesthetics, the reader sees the people and objects that Tulio notices and contemplates.
In accordance with symbolist techniques inherited by the modernistas, Díaz Rodríguez uses images from the empirical world to convey the emotional state of the characters. As Tulio contemplates the Loire River, for example, the objects that he observes reflect his emotional state in suffering the loss of Belén; the river waters seem to reflect his soul as they enter the sea, which sings and smiles indifferently. Díaz Rodríguez’s symbolist agenda is explicitly evident in later passages, particularly in one passage describing the objects surrounding Tulio and how the objects’ almas (souls) begin to weep (Sangre patricia, 49).
It has been a simplistic commonplace among some readers to see modernista literature as an escape from social and political realities and a flight into “art for art’s sake.” A superficial reading of Sangre patricia could lead one to such a conclusion. Indeed, Tulio often does seek escape from his circumstance, using drugs, dreaming, and sleep as his escape before finding his final solution. Nevertheless, his actions should be understood as a protest against what Tulio (and Díaz Rodríguez) viewed as a society too vulgar to be tolerable. Along the same lines, the idealistic Borja suffers from the behavior of an adultress wife, and the narrator describes the affair and her lover as vulgar. In general, the traditional morés of bourgeois society are seen as signs of mediocrity.
Despite the negative attitude toward American capitalism, the characters in Sangre patricia are fascinated with the signs and objects that they associate with modernity. These objects also appear in Los de abajo, Santa, Política feminista, and El mal metafísico. In Sangre patricia, the characters make frequent reference to new “science”—such as telegraphy—as well as new ideas in the realm of spirituality and religion (such as telepathy), as the “miracles” of the times. Only by embracing this modernity can they escape the vulgarity, then, of the status quo. This generalized pattern is underscored by Gálvez’s Carlos Riga, who vehemently rejects vulgar middle-class values.
More than a crisis of modernity, however, the characters suffer from a crisis in belief systems in this new modern age. Through much of the novel they discuss exactly what is worthy of belief. For example, Tulio and Borja ponder the validity of Tulio’s belief in sirenas, typifying the crisis over the ancient beliefs they still find attractive even in the early twentieth century. Both of these belief systems merely reaffirm the patriarchal order that predominates in the fiction of this period.
The main characters in Azuela’s Los de abajo also suffer a crisis in belief systems, although none of them are nearly as prone to introspection as either Tulio Arcos and his friends in Sangre patricia or as Carlos Riga and others in El mal metafísico. Tulio seems to focus increasingly on himself; the protagonist of Los de abajo, Demetrio Macías, as well as his cohorts, are progressively subsumed by pure movement, void of thought. They are notably incapable of articulating any coherent ideological basis for their actions as players in a revolution for social justice. The one exception is Luis Cervantes, an intellectual who joins the forces with Demetrio Macías and eloquently, though hypocritically, espouses the social and political ideals of the Mexican Revolution.
Díaz Rodríguez paints a visual picture of the physical beauty of the setting, emphasizing the color blue (blue skies, blue sea, etc.) that the modernistas associated with art. Azuela, on the other hand, uses more conventional imagery to suggest character and settings rather than to explain them directly. Just as frequently as Díaz Rodríguez employs images of artistic beauty, Azuela uses animal imagery to characterize Demetrio and his men as humans who have been reduced to animal-like reactions to their immediate circumstance. In using this type of imagery, Azuela assumes the implicit role of the writer as nineteenth-century scientist who recognized the place of humans in the animal kingdom.6
Los de abajo is a novel of three parts, each of which corresponds to a specific moment of the Mexican Revolution.7 The first part consists of twenty-one chapters that tell of the initial organization of the revolutionaries under the leadership of protagonist Demetrio Macías. In Mexican history, this is the period in which the revolution consists of fighting against Victoriano Huerta, who had assassinated the idealist Francisco Madero, hero of the peasants and working class. Huerta, on the other hand, represented a return to the forces of Porfirio Díaz. The first part ends with the battle in Zacatecas, which took place in June 1914 and signaled the downfall of Huerta. The second part, which contains fourteen chapters, emphasizes movement and consists of one battle after another. This part of the novel suggests the historical divisions among the groups under the leadership of Zapata, Villa, and Carranza. This process led to the Convention of Aguascalientes and the separation between Villa and Carranza. The third part of Los de abajo, consisting of seven chapters, relates the defeat of Demetrio’s men as a kind of counterpart of their victories in the first part. Carranza’s army ambushes them and, at the very end, Demetrio seems isolated, disoriented, and hopeless. The novel has a rather circular structure in which Demetrio is in the same place at the end that he was in the beginning. Given all that he has experienced, however, it is not really as much a figural circle as a figural spiral.
Azuela was a liberal humanist as well as a fervent follower of Madero, the idealist who took power after Porfirio Díaz. Azuela was an ally of Pancho Villa and bitter enemy of Carranza. In 1914, Azuela joined the revolutionary troops of Julián Medina as a medic. The experience of what he saw with these troops and what they related to him was the source of his disillusionment with the Mexican Revolution as well as the basis for his writing Los de abajo.
Azuela completed and published Los de abajo in El Paso, Texas; it appeared in serial form in the newspaper El Paso del Norte in 1915, an important year in Mexican history.8 Carranza had come into power with a new ruling class and a new spirit of nationalism in Mexico. The leading intellectuals were figures such as Antonio Caso and Martín Luis Guzmán; Azuela, on the other hand, was marginal at best. Nevertheless, within a decade Los de abajo had a broad readership in Mexico and was considered the quintessential national novel of the Mexican Revolution.
In addition to his skill in suggesting and showing, rather than telling, Azuela uses a systematic set of images and symbols to communicate his idea of the essence of the Mexican Revolution. The first of these images is the hoja seca (dry leaf) that Camila observes fall dead at her feet in the fourteenth chapter of the first part of the novel.9 Later in the first part, Solís explains how the revolution is a hurricane and, once again, an hoja seca (Los de abajo, 63). Near the very end of the first part, a third image of the revolution appears in the form of Luis Cervantes’s observation of smoky clouds (Los de abajo, 73). In the third part, Valderrama describes the revolution as a volcano: “!Amo la Revolución como amo al volcán que irrumpe! Al volcán porque es volcán; a la Revolución porque es Revolución!” (I love the Revolution like I love the volcano that erupts! The volcano because it’s a volcano; the Revolution because it’s Revolution; Los de abajo, 128). In the third chapter of the third part, Demetrio’s men return to the town of Juchipila, the “cradle” of the revolution. As they enter Juchipila, Azuela employs images of burned, black crosses, images of destruction and death. Near the end of the novel, when Demetrio’s wife asks him why he continues fighting, Demetrio responds: “Mira esa piedra cómo no se pára” (Look how that stone doesn’t stop; Los de abajo, 137). Thus, the novel ends with an image of the revolution as the rolling rock that cannot stop, as movement with no content.
Azuela’s journalistic style (which was innovative for the times) involved only brief descriptions of characters and settings, generally free of romantic exuberance and modernista adornment. His use of imagery to suggest emotional states is occasionally comparable to that of Díaz Rodríguez. In one passage that is not typical of the style of Los de abajo he uses the symbolist technique (of Díaz Rodríguez) to suggest an emotional state. In this passage, Camila finds objects expressing the emotion of sadness, which, of course, is an expression of her own sadness: “Todo era igual; pero en las piedras, en las ramas secas, en el aire embalsamado y en la hojarasca, Camila encontraba ahora algo muy extraño: como si todas aquellas cosas tuvieran mucha tristeza” (Los de abajo, 47).
The narrator in Los de abajo maintains a position of neutrality, attaining the Flaubertian ideal of “transparence” throughout virtually every page of the text. In only three passages does the narrator editorialize briefly. Azuela was well aware of his craft, having published an article in criticism of Federico Gamboa’s lack of novelistic sophistication by including editorial comments in his later fiction.
In terms of style and characterization, Federico Gamboa and Manuel Gálvez proceeded as nineteenth-century novelists. In Santa, Gamboa writes in the mode of the most refined of the novelists of the previous century, using a self-consciously “correct” style that imitated the Spanish masters of realist fiction. It is also obvious that he was aware of the stylistic tours de force of the modernistas. In the early chapters, he introduces characters and settings painstakingly, with detailed descriptions of the characters’ physical appearance and background as well as room-by-room descriptions of dwellings. Like Díaz Rodríguez, Gamboa begins in the present situation and then goes into the main character’s background in the second chapter that functions as a flashback.
Santa is a two-part novel with five chapters in each part. With the exception of the second chapter, the novel develops in a basically chronological manner, telling the story of the transgressive young rural woman, Santa, who becomes corrupted in the city. In her rural setting, she is described as pure and innocent. “Dishonored” by a soldier, Santa is rejected by her family and must go to the city to make a living as a prostitute. Eventually she falls in love with a bullfighter who provides a stable economic life for her, but she abandons him to return to her former profession. From there, she fails in her attempts to reform herself, and her life degenerates: she fails in her relationship with another man and is no longer allowed to work in any of the houses of prostitution. At the end, shortly before dying, she joins with Hipólito, a blind man who had loved her from the beginning and who rescues her. Hipólito is a physically unattractive character who had fallen in love with Santa because she had been kind to him and because he recognized a certain human decency in her that few others were able to perceive.
In Santa, as in Sangre patricia, there is a sense of unrest and uneasiness. In both novels, a revision of values is suggested, as the main characters seem unable to tolerate the established values of the status quo—a patriarchal, heterosexist, and bourgeois society. The values in Santa, of course, are those of the porfiriato; Porfirio Díaz’s regime of “peace and order” was becoming increasingly illegitimate and in fact having less and less to do with either peace or order. The overall vision that Gamboa offers is pessimistic. As Pacheco has observed, there is a certain symmetry between Santa’s destiny as part of the machinery exploited in the house of prostitution and the destiny of her brothers, who work as part of the machinery exploited in a factory.10 Similarly, Debra Castillo points to the mechanized nature of human activity and, more specifically, the equation established between human beings and meat for consumption.11
Gamboa’s language—closer to Galdós’s than to Azuela’s—demonstrates the style of a writer who self-consciously wanted to communicate to the reader that he was a literary stylist and a modern novelist in a nation where the genre of the novel still suffered a shaky identity. Gamboa’s modernity was primarily that of being in tune with certain naturalist precepts of the time, carrying out his “scientific” experiment of observing the pure and innocent young girl in both a rural and an urban setting. As such, this story is introduced by Gamboa at the beginning of the second chapter as “La historia vulgar de las muchachas pobres que nacen en el campo y en el campo se crían al aire libre, entre brisas y flores; ignorantes, castas y fuertes; al cuidado de la tierra, nuestra eterna madre cariño; con amistades aladas, de pájaros libres de verdad, y con ilusiones tan puras” (The vulgar story of poor girls born in the country and in the country reared in fresh air, among breezes and flowers; ignorant, chaste, and strong; under the care of the earth, our eternal mother of affection, of winged friends, of free birds of truth, and with such pure illusions).12
Like Azuela, Gamboa thought of himself as a modern scientist whose characters, like animals, responded to instincts, as he reveals in one of his early descriptions of Santa as “guiada por un deseo meramente animal” (guided by mere animal desire; Santa, 731). Gamboa was also interested enough in the objective world of modernity around him to note the modern tranvías, the modern focos eléctricos, the movement in the modern city, and the like. For Gamboa, they are the objects of a corrupt modernity, a corruption that he had observed literarily in his European models of naturalism and a corruption that he was noting in the modern Mexican society of the Díaz regime. These attitudes make Gamboa an interesting case study of the Spanish American novelist at the turn of the century. He was obviously aware of modern society, modern science, and the basic precepts of naturalism. Nevertheless, he does not communicate a strong commitment to the values of any of the three. Rather, he resists modernity. The end of Santa suggests why, for Gamboa’s underlying world vision was marked considerably by Christianity. As Brushwood has pointed out, neither his naturalism nor his Christianity was strictly orthodox.13
For Castillo, Santa was clearly and unmistakably the product of a turn-of-the-century masculinist aesthetic.14 In her reading of this novel, she argues that the workings of the Porfirian gestural economy define and displace sexuality onto an aesthetic representation that later in the century takes on its own afterlife. She also establishes important links between poverty and the fantasized erotic object.15
Gamboa was a novelist with neither the situation nor the inclination to be deeply critical of Mexican society and the Porfirio Díaz regime. On the contrary, he served in the diplomatic corps under Díaz and reconverted to Catholicism before writing Santa; near the end of Santa, Gamboa’s Christian interests are evident. His description of the situation of Santa and Hipólito is as follows: “Sólo les quedaba Dios. ¡Dios queda siempre!” (All they had left was God. God always remains!; Santa, 918). In Santa, as in Gamboa’s other novels, Christian concern and hope seem to offer a solution for the characters, but they are not strong enough elements to allow for a positive outcome. This quote also reveals one of the weaknesses of Gamboa as a stylist: his generally omniscient and neutral narrator begins to editorialize to the reader about these Christian principles. As a diplomat for the Díaz regime and as a practicing Catholic, then, Gamboa was not positioned as an independent novelist to be critical of the Mexican government, the Catholic Church, or a bourgeois and patriarchal society in general.
José Rafael Pocaterra, on the other hand, is openly satirical of the status quo in Política feminista. Set in a small town in Venezuela, this novel intends to function as a national novel: the omniscient narrator explains from the outset that, even though the novel is set in the provinces—the town of Valencia—the story could be the same in Caracas or anywhere else in Venezuela. It is basically an account of middle-class life in this small town, with the main plot line centered upon the desire that Bebé, a local politico, has for a young woman, Josefina, who belongs to one of the town’s respectable families of gente decente. In the end, the novel is a self-conscious antiromantic work in which the couple does not fall in love and is never joined, and no one suffers death at the end.16 The young and “decent” Josefina rejects the “vulgar” Bebé. Despite the explicitly antiromantic elements of the novel, Pocaterra does share Isaacs’s interest in the material world of the couple’s erotic lives (such as a fascination with the details of their clothing), and he does engage the reader in the observation of the characters’ furtive miradas.17 Consequently, the issue of materialism is as evident in Política feminista as it was in Santa.18
Pocaterra is known as a satirist and costumbrista, and he does, indeed, provide a detailed account of local customs. In the end, in fact, the reader reaches the conclusion that from Pocaterra’s perspective, there is no real questioning of patriarchal heterosexist values: life in Venezuela would be acceptable if only manners could be improved. The politicians, for example, exhibit the worst manners, and Pocaterra implies that if the politicians could improve their manners and mala conducta, government would also improve. His satire, however, is directed against all, and he exhibits equal disdain for new bourgeois values and conservative Catholic beliefs.
To a large extent, as seen in Sangre patricia and El mal metafísico, the conflicts of Política feminista are based on differences in values and belief systems. On the one hand, the women in the novel represent the traditional values of Catholicism and the old aristocracy of Venezuela. Several of the men represent the new values of modernity and the bourgeoisie. Interestingly, Pocaterra associates good manners and values with reading. Josefina and her sisters are readers of literature, and they are portrayed as educated, well-mannered characters. Bebé, on the other hand, is not a reader of literature and is characterized as vulgar. Again, it appears that if only the politicians could read and write better, both government and national life would improve.
A more subtle dichotomy can be observed in the function of interior and exterior space in Política feminista. Near the beginning and near the end of the novel, the interior space inside the home of Josefina and her sisters is the space of reading, traditional values, and good manners. This is the feminine space. The exterior space which they observe through their window is the masculine space of modern values, lack of religion, poor government, and bad manners.
Política feminista is the only one of these five novels with a humorous tone. But Pocaterra uses a variety of methods to establish complicity with the reader, often evoking a nostalgic tone similar to the tone in the fiction of Tomás Carrasquilla. Like Carrasquilla, Pocaterra regularly uses demonstrative adjectives that lure the reader into assuming a role of experience shared with the narrator. For example, early in the novel he refers to “esa mezcla de vagabundería y sentimentalismo” as if the reader were acquainted with this combination (Política femenista, 14, my emphasis). And near the end of the novel, Pocaterra refers to “uno de esos ramos de flores,” again assuming prior common experience of reader and writer (Política femenista, 83, my emphasis). Consequently, the issue of complicity and the reader as voyeur is as significant in Política feminista as it is in Santa.19
Pocaterra’s satirical barbs are wide-ranging, for he uses satire throughout the novel. The omniscient narrator, for example, occasionally intervenes to explain and clarify matters of social and political importance. Nevertheless, he offers no consistent political message or consistent ideological base for his critiques. On the surface, he seems to suggest that the solution to Venezuela’s problems is education, which, of course, promotes reading and good manners. In the fictional world of Política feminista, however, Pocaterra criticizes all values—traditional and modern—and all social classes, as well as both old and new political discourses. Consequently, the reader reaches the conclusion that Pocaterra’s vision and aesthetic do not go beyond the entertainment value to be found in his satire.
Carlos Riga, the twenty-year-old protagonist in El mal metafísico, also faces crises in values and belief systems. The first part of this three-part novel presents Riga’s literary interests and conflicts with his father, who wants his son to become a lawyer. Riga not only wants to be a poet, but he desires to modernize Argentine letters by innovating poetry along the lines of modernismo. By the end of the first part, Riga publishes a new literary magazine, La Idea Moderna, with the hopes of moving Argentine literature toward the innovations in which he holds interests. The second and third parts relate Riga’s increasing problems and failures. His literary efforts go relatively unrecognized, his economic life continually worsens, and the final stages of his story tell of his isolation, alcoholism, and death.
El mal metafísico deals with the (then) new modernismo, but Gálvez is actually as traditional as Gamboa in terms of narrative technique. He carefully describes the characters upon introducing them, and the prose style corresponds to the elegant writing of traditionalists such as Azuela and Gamboa. Gálvez seems interested in modernity as a topic to consider, but his heart clearly lies with the traditionalists. Gálvez also reveals his fundamentally conservative worldview in the third part of his novel: characters who have adopted conventional ideas and lifestyles—abandoning literature—do well; those who do not, suffer. Thus, Gamboa would seem to embrace the patriarchal order.
The multiple and often contradictory ideas embodied in La idea moderna, Riga’s literary magazine, are central to an understanding of El mal metafísico as an example of the early-twentieth-century Latin American novel. The narrator offers the following description of the magazine when it is about to be launched: it is to look for the “regeneration of the republic, to restore old ideals.”20
Aside from the narrator’s ironic and mildly derisive tone, his comments about the magazine’s proposed role for the nation are noteworthy. In his introductory description of the magazine, it seems to propose a conservative—even reactionary—role similar to the equally conservative work of the intellectuals and political leaders of the Regeneration in Colombia (see chapter 1). Indeed, the idea of restoring old ideals sounds like a conservative proposal. With this introduction, the reader is wary of the unnamed ideology that might bring “unity” to the nation. Carlos Riga and his cohorts are not at all consistent, however, in their apparently conservative ideals for the nation. In later discussions, these same intellectuals embrace the cultural modernity of Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, rejecting the more traditional cultural and linguistic values inherited from Spain. Thus, those three nations are described by one of the characters as “civilizados” and Spain as a “barbarian” nation (El mal metafísico, 214), in part because Spaniards still worried about the rules of grammar. Clearly, these young writers are not entirely in line with the conservative agenda of the Regeneration in Colombia, for the latter did indeed fervently follow the rules of Spanish grammar.21
In addition to the numerous contradictions in the aesthetic and ideological program of La Idea Moderna, this novel stands out as a synecdoche for the discursive mode of most of the discussions of value and belief systems. More specifically, most of the ideas, values, and beliefs are conceived in the broad context of nation—as national values rather than those of an individual or a human collectivity smaller than a nation. Thus, the vicissitudes of Carlos Riga and his peers are conceived and presented as national vicissitudes. And ongoing discussions of culture are really debates about the past, present, and/or future of Argentine culture.
Both the implied author of El mal metafísico and the protagonist Carlos Riga seem to aspire to be modern, but that is not a consistent pattern either. Clearly, Riga is fascinated with many aspects of what was considered new and modern: his poetic writing rings much like Rubén Darío’s, and his persona has much of Tulio Arcos from Sangre patricia. The implied author seems equally fascinated with what is new, modern, and in fashion culturally. There are regular references throughout the text to la vida moderna, making it obvious that among all the new and old values, lo moderno is an overriding concern.
In the final analysis, however, Gálvez seems suspicious, at best, of modernity and the bourgeois values associated with modernity in the new Argentina. His protagonist, who embodies modern literary values, dies of alcoholism after a series of devastating rejections by the cultural establishment. At the end of the novel, the narrator describes him as someone not capable of adapting to “la bajeza de nuestra vida moderna” (the lowness of our modern life; El mal metafísico, 226). Here the narrator intercalates himself (nuestra) as one of the critics of modern life and, implicitly, as a supporter of the status quo.
The reader of El mal metafísico concludes, despite the contradictions, that both modern literature (here, modernismo) and modernity are a failure in turn-of-the-century Argentina. The reader is also invited to conclude that Riga’s problem is his mal metafísico—his “sickness” of dreaming and creating as it is described in the fifth chapter of the novel. Even this idea, which is so clear early in the text, becomes clouded by the end because of Riga’s severe alcoholism. This disease is described in such convincing detail that the reader is invited to speculate along at least two lines: (1) Is Riga’s most serious ailment el mal metafísico or, in reality, alcoholism? (2) Is el mal metafísico in fact just one external manifestation of his alcoholism? Whatever the conclusion might be concerning the exact nature of Riga’s sickness, it is evident that his demise has much more to do with his individual problems than with a nation that is either too traditional or too modern.
Pocaterra had implied that many of Venezuela’s ills could be improved upon or cured by good taste and good manners within the national culture. Gálvez is not nearly as consistent or explicit, but he does occasionally suggest his admiration for good taste. His narrator comments negatively on the bad taste of the bourgeoisie and presents characters who demonstrate buen gusto in a positive light. Gálvez, then, implicitly reinforces the patriarchal order as much as did Pocaterra.
Despite the strengths and weaknesses of these five novels that critics have freely and openly pointed out, these works have survived literary scrutiny in a variety of ways. Los de abajo was read and commented upon widely in the 1920s in Mexico and became a model for the novel of the Mexican Revolution that dominated Mexican fiction for several decades. Santa was a best-seller in the early part of the century in Mexico and by the late 1930s had sold sixty thousand copies.22 Sangre patricia, Política feminista, and El mal metafísico do not have quite the same marketing record, but they have remained solidly entrenched, as have Los de abajo and Santa, in the scholarly histories of the Latin American novel.23
Of these five novelists, the most traditional with respect to form and the least critical with respect to modern society was Federico Gamboa. Gamboa was essentially a product of the porfiriato himself, having served in the diplomatic corps under Porfirio Díaz’s government, having had the luxury of writing his novels while on Díaz’s payroll abroad, and having written to a small upper-middle-class reading public that was fundamentally pro-porfiriato. Writing in 1914, after the downfall of the pro-Díaz Huerta, Gamboa stated in a conference on La novela mexicana the following: “Hoy por hoy, la novela apenas si se permite levantar la voz. Muda y sobrecogida de espanto, contempla la tragedia nacional que hace más de tres años nos devasta y aniquila.”24 Having made this declaration of the novel’s inertia, he goes on to declare its death: “La novela, de luto ya, como el país entero.”25 Making this statement in 1914, Gamboa was declaring the symbolic death of the nineteenth-century novel. This statement and Azuela’s Los de abajo mark a symbolic end of the predominance of nineteenth-century fiction writing in Latin America. El mal metafísico, too, was a strong statement in favor of traditionalism. Yet these novels also opened the door for the innovations of the 1920s and the decades that followed.
In these five novels, a masculinist aesthetic predominates; both masculinity and the masculine nation, nevertheless, are fragmented, incoherent, and fragile. The early part of the century is dominated by male writers who were insecure about their roles as novelists in nations whose patriarchal and oligarchic order was disappearing before a new bourgeoisie they did not uniformly find attractive. In the end, these writers all suggested that life was marked by futility: the ideal exoticized female other was unattainable, and the protagonists were either unable or unwilling to function as good citizens within the framework of the new bourgeois order.
These five turn-of-the-century Spanish American novels exhibit both the diverse interests and contradictions of the Latin American writer of the period, particularly with respect to modernity. They are still strongly oriented toward science and religion, as well as toward the realist-naturalist novel that predominated in the previous century. But at the same time that these novelists were attracted to some aspects of modernity, they tended to reject the modernity of U.S. capitalism that they all considered, in different ways, basically vulgar. In their texts, Díaz Rodríguez and Pocaterra were most explicitly negative toward U.S. capitalism; Gálvez criticized the bourgeois values, the same values that he embraced later in his life. These novelists embraced rather than criticized a patriarchal, heterosexist nineteenth-century order. Even the masculinist aesthetic, however, was fragile: the novelists were insecure about their roles, and none of their works, with the possible exception of Los de abajo, became the monument to the respective national literary tradition their authors hoped they would become. All five writers ostensibly desired to be modern, although Gamboa and Pocaterra occasionally resisted modernity, exhibiting nostalgic attitudes toward the conventional values and lifestyles of the late nineteenth century.