El cuerpo como memoria literaria cubana : Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima y Virgilio Piñera

Cuba assumes a special place in the genealogy of the latin American Baroque and its twentieth-century recuperation, ongoing in our twenty-first century—the neobaroque. As Alejo Carpentier has pointed out (and as architectural critics confirm), the Caribbean lacks a monumental architectural baroque heritage comparable with that of the mainland, such as the hyperornate Churrigueresque ultrabaroque of central Mexico and Peru (fig. 1). Nevertheless, it was two Cuban intellectuals, Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, who spearheaded a new turn in neobaroque discourse after World War II by popularizing the notion of an insurgent, mestizo New World baroque unique to the Americas. Carpentier and Lezama Lima are the key authors of the notion of a decolonizing American baroque, a baroque that expressed contraconquista (counterconquest), as Lezama punned, countering the familiar identification of the baroque with the repressive ideology of the Counter-Reformation and its allies, the imperial Catholic Iberian states (80). Lezama and Carpentier argue that the imported Iberian state baroque was transformed into the transculturated, syncretic New World baroque at the hands of the (often anonymous) native artisans who continued to work under the Europeans, grafting their own indigenous traditions onto the iconography of the Catholic baroque style. The New World baroque is a product of the confluence (however unequal) of Iberian, pre-Columbian, and African cultures during the peaceful seventeenth century and into the eighteenth in Spain's and Portugal's territories in the New World. The examples studied by Lezama and Carpentier are all from the monumental baroque sculpture and architecture of Mexico, the Andes, and Brazil's Minas Gerais province: the work of the Brazilian mulatto artist O Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa [1738–1814]; see fig. 2 in Zamora in this issue) and the indigenous Andean artist José Kondori (dates unknown; see fig. 1 in Zamora), central Mexico's Church of San Francisco Xavier Tepotzotlán (fig. 1), and the folk baroque Church of Santa María Tonantzintla (see fig. 3 in Zamora), to mention a few landmarks and names.

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La intertextualidad como recurso neobarroco en El hombre, la hembra y el hambre, de Daína Chaviano

La Colmena ◽

10.36677/lacolmena.v0i101.11142 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 43

Author(s):

Maritza M. Buendía ◽

Lucía Ramírez-Vargas

Keyword(s):

Alejo Carpentier ◽

Julia Kristeva ◽

Severo Sarduy ◽

Jose Lezama Lima ◽

Daina Chaviano

Con base en los postulados de Severo Sarduy, Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Omar Calabrese, Mijaíl Bajtín y Julia Kristeva, se analiza la intertextualidad como recurso neobarroco en la novela El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (1998), de la escritora cubana Daína Chaviano. Mediante una lectura en filigrana, se hace un estudio comparativo entre Claudia —protagonista de esta obra literaria—, Papillon y McMurphy —personajes de los filmes Papillon (1973) y One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), respectivamente—. Por último, se propone la imaginación y la recuperación del pasado histórico como un camino hacia la libertad del individuo y la construcción de identidad de los pueblos.

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